1. Transcript
1.1. Session 1, ( March 6, 2007)
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- UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 1, 3-06-2007
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COLLINGS
- OK. Good morning, Lois. Let me just ID the session here. Jane Collings
interviewing Lois Arkin on March 6, 2007, at her office. And we're ready
to get started with our interview. We usually sort of start off like
really asking people about their early life, as perhaps we've discussed,
so why don't you just tell me when and where you were born?
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ARKIN
- Well, I was born in Detroit, Michigan, at Women's Hospital, delivered by
my "Uncle Al", who was my mother's uncle, so I guess -- no, mother's
cousin. And -- on February 18, 1937. So I was, for the first few years
of my life, I think that we lived in the very central city, and when I
was about three, we moved to a suburban area where there were no roads.
I mean, there were roads, but most of the roads were dirt roads, and
there weren't all that many houses, although I imagine it was early
[tracked] housing in that neighborhood. And this was in Detroit,
Michigan, I think I mentioned. "Auto City" and future city of soul
music, future capital of Motown. And so I don't really have any memories
of very much before we moved into the suburban space, but I don't know
whether I actually remember this because I actually remember it, or
because of all the stories that my mother told me so many times and in
front of so many people as we would reminisce about growing up.So the one thing that was repeated many times was the time that she
bought me a new pail, I had a sandbox. So I went, and -- oh, shall I say
that she had new carpeting. And so I did promptly fill up my pail from
my sandbox outside and brought it in, and very delightfully showed her
how wonderful it was by spilling it all on her new carpeting. She was
not a happy camper. But I remember -- I do remember, much later in life,
I think in my -- even in my pre-teen years, there was a good deal of
hanging out in the woods; we were suburban, and so -- maybe not so much
woods, actually, but fields, many, many fields, and very, very proudly
bringing her home garter snakes for Mother's Day, other kinds of little
animals that we might catch that she was maybe not so pleased to have.Some of my earliest memories -- of course, when we moved into the
suburban area, my father was, I think, already at that time starting to
be a builder, and I think he started out building garages for people,
and he had, I think, designed and built our home, which was not a real
large home, but for that time, probably quite a middle-class home; it
had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one upstairs and one down -- I'm
trying to remember, did we actually have a bathroom downstairs, I'm not
sure -- and a two-car garage -- no, maybe it was only a one-car garage,
maybe I'm kind of fantasizing. This was of course in the '40s, in the
early '40s, and what Dad did do -- it's so interesting, now that you
think about it -- he built us a playhouse onto the garage, so that was a
place where we kids could really go and play and have our own playspace.
And he built us a little concrete swimming pool. It was no deeper than
three feet deep, but of course, that was a wonderful place; lots of kids
came and shared our little -- it wasn't very big, probably it was no
more than 10x10, maybe 12x12, I'm not sure. But a small little swimming
pool, and we did spend time in it.But of those early memories, maybe by the time I was five -- oh, I do
remember my first day at school, at kindergarten. My mother took me, and
I was totally hysterical that I was being left alone by my mom, and I
remember that's quite a common thing for people as they remember back to
their first day of school; I think I've heard that story from a lot of
people. And of course, in those first few years of school, we were all
bussed; it wasn't until I think I was in maybe 5th grade, 4th or 5th
grade, that there was a school built in our neighborhood that we could
walk to. I will remember clearly, it was James Vernor School, because
Vernor's Ginger Ale started in Detroit. And one of the wonderful things
about James Vernor School is that we used to have a field trip to the
Vernor's Ginger Ale plant every year, and we had a school song. And I
still remember it, and I'm going to sing it for you. It goes, "James
Vernor School, I love you. No other school above you." I'm not sure I
remember the rest. (laughter) But going down to the James Vernor Ginger
Ale Plant was where I first got exposed to cream sodas, and that was
really special.Let's see, I remember -- I have thoughts of being very starry-eyed as a
kid. I was one of four children, I was the second, so I have a sister
[Joan] two years older than me, who I was talking to when you walked in,
and I have a brother [Richard] five years younger and a baby sister
[Judy] six years younger. Of course, my baby sister is in her 60s now,
but I still refer to her as my baby sister. I imagine parents do that
frequently too. And I think that my older sister was extraordinarily
influential on me; she -- I always felt so hated by her as a child.
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COLLINGS
- Oh, wow.
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ARKIN
- Maybe not as a very young child, but certainly by the time we were
approaching adolescence. She didn't really want to have anything to do
with me, and it was very painful for me. And I adored her. No matter
what, I adored her. And I think it was the cause of my early interest in
psychology. It was a way that I learned to cope with the world, and not
-- I think I learned not to take that sort of thing too personally. But
what it did do, and these are things that -- I imagine there are similar
stories in many households -- so my parents really never -- very, very
rarely ever used physical violence on it. My dad did from time to time
spank us, but he always said -- it was always methodical, and it was
almost never reactionary, and he always said, "This is going to hurt me
more than it will hurt you." And -- but I think that my father was
beaten terribly as a child by my grandfather, who was a Russian
immigrant, and I think that was a source of a lot of rebellion on his
part. I'm not sure about his brothers and sister, I never had that
conversation with them. And I never really had it very much with my
father, but I think my mother had told me that. And I think a few
conversations with my dad before he died indicated that that was a
reason why he would often go off by himself, and he had a pet bear, he
says -- I don't believe it. (laughter)But at any rate, where was I before that? So my sister would kind of beat
up on me, and I would beat up -- or we would get together and beat up on
our younger brother and sister, and I am sure that there was much more
trauma in their lives than their was in ours. And I think that
frequently happens too when there are so many children in a household,
is that the -- you know, it kind of goes down the line, and if someone's
bigger than you, you don't try to beat up on them; you beat up on
someone that's smaller than you. And I have always, as a more mature
adult, always had so many regrets and sorrows, and do talk to my younger
brother and sister about it from time to time, and hope that they've
gotten over it. I'm kind of a proponent of reality therapy. Oh, OK. It's
OK to talk about it for a little while, but then kind of let's get on
with life; here we are now, are we going to mope? And my older sister,
whom I still absolutely adore, and she, I believe, really does adore me
today, and we're very, very close. And I have learned so much from her,
and I know she's learned a lot from me too, as adults.But I remember, some things that I remember that really stand out for me
as a child was looking up to the older kids, to the day that I would
also carry a three-ring looseleaf binder, and -- when I think of what
kids do today, in terms of those rolling backpacks -- that goodness
they're rolling now, and they're not always carrying them on their
backs. But that was it, and I can remember as an older adolescent,
looking up to the girls -- it's just astounding when I stop to think
about it. This has nothing -- I don't think it has anything to do with
who I am today, but I can remember looking, in high school, and had this
kind of really weird posture, kind of bent over and to the side. Well,
maybe it was influential, in that it was part of the instilling in me a
love of learning. But going back to elementary school, we had
handwriting classes. I'm not sure they have that sort of thing today.
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COLLINGS
- They do, yeah.
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ARKIN
- And I remember we would have to practice writing things sometimes 25, 50,
100 times, to get the handwriting just right. And some of the quotes
that I remember most was, "Without the love of books, the richest man is
poor." And of course, that was way before computers, and -- well, of
course, we do have books on computers today, but -- And so let's see,
what else? I have visions of myself climbing trees a lot as a child, of
hanging out under the street lamps with lots of kids, of riding my bike
freely wherever I wanted, of walking freely wherever I wanted. I had
terrible, terrible fears, because my parents did allow us to go to all
the Saturday matinees, and we did go to the movies very, very frequently
as young children, but we saw these horror movies too, and I think that
the horror movies -- I don't think they had ratings in those days, and I
don't think parents knew --
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COLLINGS
- It was a very dark period, (inaudible) as well.
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ARKIN
- Yeah. But pictures that terrified me horribly as a child were The Picture
of Dorian Gray and The Beast With Five Fingers, and my older sister knew
that, and she -- whenever she wanted to kind of get at me, she would
say, "OK, the beast with five fingers is coming after you." I remember
one night, my parents were getting all dressed up to go out, because
they had some kind of big event to go to. And my sister decided to
frighten me, and I became so hysterical, it was very, very hard for them
to leave.But the other thing I remember being terrified of as a child were
spiders, any kind, but of course the kind that were fairly prominent
were daddy long-legs. And I do believe there's kind of something genetic
in us, and that different people are terribly frightened of different
animals. I was never afraid of snakes or any other kind of insect or any
other kind of animal, just spiders. And of course, we know people that
are -- oh, and I loved mice, and rats were interesting too. Other people
have this with mice and rats; other people have it with snakes; other
people have it just with different kind of insects, bees and so forth.
But with me, the only thing was spiders, and so I'm not sure how that
all started, but the idea that, oh, someone -- maybe it was some kid I
saw -- would catch a spider and take its legs off and bury them, and --
which sounds kind of cruel, but I'm not sure whether it hurt them or not
-- so of course, I had terrible nightmares about these spiders growing
up and coming back at all of us and so forth. So I suppose there were a
few other things that I was afraid of, but mostly I don't ever remember
being too afraid -- oh, I do remember -- I think it was very, very rare,
but every one in awhile, one heard about a child being kidnapped and cut
up and its body parts being found in different places. I mean, I suppose
that's not so very unusual today, but it was terribly unusual in those
days, and that terrified me. And so, let's see, where are we? We're
still --
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COLLINGS
- Where is your mother's family?
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ARKIN
- My mother's family is from Boston, and my father was born in Detroit, my
mother [Helene] was born in Boston. Actually, my mother's parents were
from Germany, and my father's [Jack] parents were from Russia. So my
parents were first-generation, and I'm only second-generation US-born.
They are -- three of my grandparents lived well into my middle age, and
we only lost one, my paternal grandmother, when she was in her 50s. But
all of the rest of them lived into their 80s. Yes, so that bodes well
for a fairly long life.
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COLLINGS
- Yes, wonderful.
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ARKIN
- And my maternal grandmother [Millie], she was so funny. Very, very
German; she was quite stereotypical, in terms of -- I would say -- she
was an amazing woman. She -- it was hard for me to really appreciate her
'til I was in my own middle age, and now I look back on all the
incredible qualities that she had that I see in myself and some of my
siblings as well. And also what my mother had to overcome, because she
was very, very German, and very meticulous, and very do-it-now,
everything, do it now. And she was always involved in philanthropic
organizations, and she was very committed; she worked as a volunteer
well into her 80s with her local schools in Orange County, and she was
very proud of all her awards. My family is Jewish, I don't think I
mentioned that, and so both of my grandfathers were quite Orthodox, but
not my maternal grandmother at all. She was -- her name was Millie, and
so she often got referred to as "Thoroughly Modern Millie," and she had
her own business and she smoked cigarettes, and she drove, at a very
young age she actually taught me how to drive, at a very young age, 14.
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COLLINGS
- I'm sorry, this was your mother's --?
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ARKIN
- This is my mother's --
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COLLINGS
- Your mother's mother.
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ARKIN
- My mother's mother, who was Thoroughly Modern Millie. She was -- I
remember when there were also very hard times for me as an adult,
particularly after I had started this organization, and money was
frequently very, very short. So even though my grandmother's children
were supporting her, I was one of those people that would never ask my
parents for anything once I was independent -- I feel very differently
about that today, but we can talk about that later -- and the
implications for other people that have come out of affluent families.
But -- well, that became -- my family was certainly not affluent growing
up in those early years. But -- I forgot what I was going to say. My grandmother -- oh, she used
to give me donations regularly, she would give me donations, even though
the money she was getting was from her children to live on, to
supplement her Social Security in her elderly years. And -- but she was
quite remarkable, very, very focused. Always knew exactly what she
wanted, when she wanted; not an ounce of procrastination in her. And she
had a beauty parlor, so some of my early memories, actually, were going
to Grandma's beauty salon, and having those big machines that give you
permanents and hairdryers and all kinds of things like that.
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COLLINGS
- So she had her own business.
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ARKIN
- She had her own business, so that was in -- surely she had it in -- maybe
she started it after the Depression, because I think my grandfather had
also been a builder, he was a builder, and I think they lost -- they had
some money, and I think they had lost everything during the Depression,
and I think that Grandma then started her beauty salon. And so she was
always working, and so my mother was home taking care of her siblings;
my mother was the oldest child, and so that was quite an education for
my mom.And my mother was very sickly as a child; they told her she had some kind
of heart disorder, and that she shouldn’t really exert herself in any
way. So she was very over-indulged, and she was taken care of a lot, and
yet she was taking care of her younger brother and sister. And my
grandmother, all of the energy, in terms of education and direction, was
put into my uncle, who became a fairly well-known physician, he was a
gynecologist, and ultimately ended up at UC Irvine here in Orange
County. But getting him through medical school was the main thing, and
so my mother and my aunt never had any college education, but they were
there to support my Uncle Ed, who did get all the way through med
school. And of course, that was the dream of every Jewish mother, is
that her son would become a doctor.And so my mother also kept kosher, kept a kosher house, and my dad was
never particularly kosher, but we all learned that. Some of my -- we all
learned -- it was very difficult for me, I never -- as an adult -- was
particularly interested in that, but it took a very, very long time for
me, after I became adult, to even taste bacon, or mix dairy with meat;
that was so much part of my upbringing not to do that. Not on any moral
or ethical grounds, it was just kind of how you were -- food habits you
are raised with. And -- but I will share this, that I remember my
father, at an early age, taking my older sister and I for a walk in the
woods, we'd do that, and coming across the carcass of a cow. Oh,
actually the skeleton, at that point, and my father saying, "You see,
kids? That's where your meat comes from." And that was the start of a
vegetarian era in our lives. And my sister was quite, quite serious
about it. I think mine lasted maybe not so very long, because I was
terribly addicted to hamburgers and hot dogs. So as long as it didn’t
look like flesh. (laughter) But of course, later in life I did become
quite vegetarian. And my sister did go back to meat-eating, but then she
became a very, very radical vegan, after reading John Robbins' book ,
Diet for a New America about 20 years ago or so.So that was -- so those walks in the woods, both by ourselves, making
forts in the woods, collecting things, bringing small animals home,
nurturing small animals that we caught, bringing a bird back to health
or the stray cats, having funerals for our animals that died. Collecting
wild berries, I'd imagine, every once in a while coming across maybe an
apple tree someplace, or -- it was a very, very suburban life that way,
with access to the wild fields that were very close by, and exploring in
those fields and having a lot of freedom, knowing our next-door
neighbors, having relatives that lived down the block and so were a
second family; if we got mad at Mom, we could run away to Aunt Jane's
house, and having my cousins there, we were all quite close. And my
grandmother also lived a walk away, or a brief bike ride. And so there
was this kind of small-town feel.And I imagine that there are still somewhere in this country people that
have that type of upbringing in a suburb, but the people that I know
today that live in suburbs do not; the children are really confined
mostly to their backyards, they are not allowed to play out on the
streets, young children. And there is so much more fear today than there
was when I was growing up, and of course, the more deserted the streets
are, the more dangerous the streets are. At any rate, in terms of my
parents, you wanted to maybe ask a little bit more about them.
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COLLINGS
- Yeah. OK, so let's see. Your dad was a builder.
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ARKIN
- My dad became like a garage builder, and he eventually became a home
builder. He did not go -- he was very, very patriotic, and he was in the
Army Air Corps in the late '20s, early '30s. And he was -- he loved
being a pilot; he was just wild about planes. And that passion for
planes did get passed on to me and my brother, both of who got -- I only
my trainer's license; I could fly alone, but I couldn't take other
people up. But my brother actually did get his pilot's license. And he
eventually, after he learned how to build with the garages and so forth,
started building these wonderful -- I say wonderful because in those
days they were wonderful, and today I guess I think they would be more
wonderful, although there was a period in my life probably that I
wouldn’t have thought that.But, you know, the average size of a single-family detached home for a
family of four in the 1950s was about 1,000 square feet, and today it's
about 3,000 square feet. But my dad was among those builders that built
those 1,000-square-feet homes for families of four, particularly for
veterans that were returning -- the war was over, this was starting in
the mid-'40s now, that he started doing it. I think we moved in -- yeah,
I guess he had built our first home probably in about 1941, even though
he mostly had started building garages then, but he did build the home
that we moved into. And then it was really by probably '45, '46 that he
started building little [tracts] of these single-family homes for the
returning veterans. And then I remember -- and he was building in the
neighborhood where we lived; we could ride our bikes to the projects,
and it was very suburban. And he was buying up this land, who knows how,
because we didn’t ever seem to have any money.And -- oh, I want to come back to the houses that Dad built, but I do
want to also mention, I can remember in those days -- we had a second
floor in our house, and when the bill collectors came and knocked on the
door, my mom and I and whoever was home, we would hide upstairs and
watch them 'til they went away, because as a builder, there was always a
cash flow; you might be land-rich or you might have equipment or you
might have all kinds of things, but you never had any cash. And so it
was -- at least in those days, and on the scale that my dad was
entrepreneurial. But he was also very, very creative, and I'll get into
that in a little while.But so, going back to some of the houses that he was building in the
neighborhood, there were lots and lots and lots of trees in this one
neighborhood, this one tract of land where he had bought up land, and my
sister -- and bulldozers were out there, and my sister and I got really
upset, because we thought he was going to bulldoze the trees, and I do
believe that he was planning to do that, and we got out there, and I
don't remember whether we just actually threatened to do this, or we
yelled so much at dinner, or if we actually laid down in front of the
bulldozers -- I think as you get older, you tend to put a little spin on
things, particularly when you have a really good reason for telling
stories about who you are and what shaped you (laughter) and the kinds
of things that happen later in life that you could kind of, "Oh, yeah."
So I don't know; I'll have to ask my sister: "What did we really do, do
you remember?" But at any rate, we feel that we influenced my dad.And always, in everything that he did, because he was quite a pioneer, he
saved the trees, and he built around the trees. And those developments
that he did that are just filled with trees are just -- the houses in
between the trees; he only took out what he needed to build the houses.
So that was quite remarkable. So my father was frequently referred to as
a visionary, in terms of his idea of where to buy land, where was going
to be the next big development.And so he did buy up a tremendous amount of land, and that later became
one of the first largest shopping malls in the country, called
Northland, in northwest Detroit. And he had owned most of the land that
Northland was built upon, and -- my sister tells this story, and I don't
remember if I remember all the details or not, but he didn’t really have
the money to do this, and this was like way out in -- you can't even
call it suburbs; it was rural country. But he was so creative; she says,
"Oh, he went, and I think the closing on the deal was scheduled for
three days down the line, and --" I'm going to get this story from her,
so I'm going to come back and get the really authentic one -- and he saw
that there was all this topsoil on the land, and he put out an ad to
come and purchase topsoil, and people came and purchased enough topsoil
for him to actually be able to close the deal on the cash that he made
from the topsoil. Stuff like that. And he was always quite clever.And eventually, much further along -- well, no, that was -- so that was
still fairly close to where we lived. We had moved into -- by 1948, we
had moved into a second house that Dad had built, a very, very large,
rambling ranch house, because that was really -- California ranch-style
house, that was really cool in architecture then. And it was a
four-bedroom house, with one, two, three, four bathrooms altogether, and
a great big rumpus room, and a library, and a huge basement, and it was
quite remarkable. And so that was really where we spent our teen years,
because I think I was 12 when we moved to that house from the one three
blocks away. And by now, of course, all of the neighborhood side streets
were being paved already. And I don't -- (phone ringing)
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COLLINGS
- Should I pause for a minute?
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ARKIN
- Shall we -- could we do that? And then -- OK.
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COLLINGS
- OK, we're back on now.
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ARKIN
- So, yeah, and we're in this remarkable -- I don't know, it must be
3,000-square-foot home, and it was -- the basement became a really
wonderful place for all our teenage friends, my sister is two years
older than me, and of course I was aspiring to have her friends, but I
had my own friends too. But we used to have many, many activities in the
basement, dancing and playing music. But also about that time, which is
quite interesting, we were having a tremendous scare about the Soviet
Union and nuclear holocaust, and it was quite -- or, no, that was
already the '50s, we were definitely out of the '40s by then; it was the
McCarthy era. No, it was the early -- oh, no, I'm sorry, wait -- where
are we? I'm sorry, '40s, early '50s maybe.Well, anyway, it was -- we were really faced with nuclear threats, and we
were having, in the schools, I believe they were having air raid drills;
we were having -- oh, goodness, during World War II; I didn’t even cover
that. We were still in the old house up the block, and we had a victory
garden, and we had blackouts, air raid drills, and the sirens would go
off and we would all turn all of the lights out in our house, and we
would have these air raid drills, and that was still during World War
II. And so we were -- so as the Soviet Union came into power, it was
like no big thing, essentially; we had already experienced air raid
drills in school. Today of course they're fire drills, but we had air
raid drills for the threat of attack, during World War II, just regular
bombs. And -- but my dad decided to go into the bomb shelter business.
You know, that was actually later, because that was -- much later, it
must have been the late '50s, because I'd already lived in California
and was married. (laughter) So just trying to -- we'll get into that,
maybe later. But we did have a bomb shelter in our new rambling ranch
house, and it was outside in the front yard, and --
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COLLINGS
- Was it for tornadoes also, or --?
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ARKIN
- No, we didn’t have tornadoes there that I recall, never recall that. But
it was a bomb shelter; I know that it was there while I still lived
there, and so it was during my teen years.
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COLLINGS
- And did it have food and water and everything?
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ARKIN
- Yeah, yeah. Maybe not so much after awhile, but I think in the beginning,
it did. And then, I guess maybe that was a -- I don't know if that was
like an early kind of experimental thing he was doing. But at any rate,
there was a bomb shelter. But the other thing that I remember, both in
the house that we lived in three blocks away and in the new house, was
that weekends were frequently -- chores frequently involved cutting the
lawn and pulling weeds, pulling weeds, and raking leaves and burning
leaves. And these were regular, regular chores, this business of weeding
and mowing and watering. And later on in my life, that had quite a large
influence on me, particularly when I lived in a suburban home in
Chatsworth. But I didn’t -- I guess I didn’t think much of it, other
than these were horrible chores I had to do.We also had two very big dog. We always had dogs, we always had dogs,
even I think when I was three years old before we moved to the first
suburban house. So one of our early dog's names was Tippy, and then we
had Lassie, and Duke and Chi-chi, and they were two big German Shepherds
when we moved into the new house. And one of our German Shepherds was an
all-white German Shepherd, and he was kind of wolf-like, and everyone
was afraid of him, but I adored him. And he did tend to bite people
sometimes, but I thought that was their problem, and I was very, very
protective of him. And he, every time he bit someone, he had to go in
for rabies observations. (laughter) So at any rate, that was --
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COLLINGS
- So did your dad talk about all of the various business deals that he was
conducting?
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ARKIN
- Yes. All the time. My dad's office was in our home for those years that I
was at home, and there was always business being conducted, and my dad
always got up very early in the morning, 5:00, and he was on the phone,
and he was getting all his contractors set up for the day, and if -- and
he was also a person that could nap anywhere, any time, and he generally
went to bed early, and he got up very early.
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COLLINGS
- So he was very entrepreneurial, and he was sort of modeling that in front
of you all the time?
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ARKIN
- I think it was true, and I think that even though I never wanted to have
anything to do with his business, that I thought it was horrible,
horrible thing to be doing and I didn’t know why at that time, other
than maybe it was because it was when he really started building houses,
and it was time to clean them up and set them up as models to sell them,
then of course we were part of the family labor team, and so it was in
there sweeping up the dirt and dusting -- getting them ready. It's
interesting, because my older sister Joan ended up working in his office
and loved it, and even when he had an office outside the home, really
running it, and she was very much part of the business for many years as
a young adult. But I never had any desire whatsoever to be involved in
that business.But I remember loving to play in the unfinished houses, and it wasn’t
just the unfinished houses that my dad was constructing, but there was
always construction going on in the neighborhood, and there were always
big basements that were being dug and big hills that were -- to climb
on, and structures to climb on, because nothing was ever enclosed them,
and there was none of this preoccupation with liability that we have
today, and so kids were always playing in the partially built houses,
and that was very, very exciting, and part of growing up in that area
and having the freedom to do that. And I see that -- you know, sometimes
it surprises me today, when I'll see construction sites here in the
city, and you never see any kids exploring them, and it's almost like
they -- I mean, sometimes it's hard to get into them, but it's also -- I
think very frequently, it's like, where is their spirit of adventure?
It's always so interesting to me.And so at any rate, Dad was very, very entrepreneurial, and he was always
talking about everything that had to do with his business, and he really
wasn’t very socially -- he didn’t have a social presence outside of his
business. And we essentially, before he really started his building
business, which I think my sister and I were already maybe seven and
nine about that time, or maybe five and seven, I'm not sure. But we were
so privileged, I felt, to have had quality time with my dad in those
very early years, because once he started that business, we -- it was
very, very rare to have quality time with him; he was so preoccupied,
from dawn to dusk. And there were so many pressures, and what I do
remember, there were so many -- my father had a lot of health issues,
even as a young child, I remember he had nosebleed hemorrhages that had
to do perhaps with the stress, but also perhaps with just the way his
genetic makeup. Now, I -- right now, I've been free of them for a few
months, but I also have nosebleeds that are sometimes very -- very
rarely actual hemorrhages; I've never actually seen a doctor about it.
But I imagine just those very close to the surface veins, and
sensitivity in this neighborhood to some of the toxins, and smog.But anyway, so that was certainly what I remember of my dad, and then we
lost him, we just really lost him for pretty much all of our teenage
years, my older sister and I. And my younger brother and sister I don't
think really got the benefits that we did, in terms of the bonding
opportunities we had with our dad, even though they in later years were
just certainly very -- we were all quite close, actually. So but I've
often said an as adult, I believe that there are many of us that grow up
in entrepreneurial families, and incidentally, it wasn’t just -- my dad
was the builder, but my mother was the bookkeeper, always. And so they
always worked together in the business.So many of us that grow up with that entrepreneurial spirit, we have kind
of a can-do, nothing's impossible, if you can dream it you can do it. In
my case, and I think that this is very, very common among people that
come from privilege, which I consider myself, is that parents instilled
in us that you can do anything you want to, if you want to do it badly
enough. And we heard that over and over and over again as children; it
was like a mantra. Of course, then the family dysfunction comes into
play too, like, "Oh, you have no stick-to-itiveness." (laughter) Or, and
I frequently say this of the Jewish mother, the stereotypical Jewish
mother, nothing is ever good enough, and so no matter how -- I think
that I got instilled with this value that I could achieve perfection,
and even though intellectually I knew you could never be perfect, but I
can remember as a young person, even as a young teenager, always
thinking, "Oh, but even though one can never achieve it, one always must
strive for it." And I think that is some of the baggage that families
like mine get put on them.But what I have come to feel today is that even though there's a certain
amount of that entrepreneurialness that is almost in your genetic -- I
don't want to say in your genetic makeup, but certainly in your
environmental influences from your family, I do believe that it is
something that can be taught, and I do believe there's a lot of business
schools today that do teach entrepreneurship. I haven't really looked at
the studies to see how successful it is, or maybe there's some case
studies, so people that have none of that in their background but have
become quite successful entrepreneurs. I guess we read about them in the
papers all the time. So whatever it is, I do believe it can be taught.
-
COLLINGS
- What were your parents talking to you and your siblings about, in terms
of your future?
-
ARKIN
- Well, that's very, very interesting. My parents were not, as I recall,
and maybe my sister would think differently, and I think my mother would
deny this today, but I never feel that education was stressed in my
family. On the other hand, I have to share with you that -- and I'll
come back to your question, remind me of it if I don't, but I want to
tell this experience. When my sister and I were about 11 and 13, mother
and dad ordered the Encyclopedia Britannica, and my sister and I were
very excited when the encyclopedias arrived. But my sister felt, you
know how they all had these onionskin covers on them, and she felt that
the covers should stay on, and I felt the covers should come off. And we
were so passionate about this cover issue, and the books coming out of
the boxes, that we actually got into I think our last really, really
serious physical fight, and both of us landed in a clench with each
other, we landed with both of our knees on a huge ashtray on the coffee
table in the den where the books were being unpacked. And then we were
rushed to Emergency, we had these big gashes in our knees, and we were
bleeding all over, and I remember when we got there --
-
COLLINGS
- Your parents are thinking, "Why did we even order these dumb books in the
first place?" (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- (laughter) I will share with you that essentially, we got there, and they
sewed -- I'm not sure, they sewed me up first, I guess, and I guess I
had about nine stitches, and I can show you the scar. And then they
sewed my sister up, and I decided to look and I fainted. And I've just
never been one to really be able to -- I mean, I don't have a problem so
much with my own blood, but I've never really been very good with all
that kind of stuff. And I should add to that, when my sister was very
young, after we learned about the dead cow, and that that's going to
happen to us too when we're dead, and after The Picture of Dorian Gray,
my sister decided that she didn’t have any blood or bones like that.
That was not going to happen to her. So it was very interesting. But I
never was in denial about what we were made of, but I think she was for
a long time. But back to the question you had asked --
-
COLLINGS
- Your parents' plans for you, when you were --
-
ARKIN
- Oh, yes. So there was never very much stress on education, and that's
what made me think, "Well, they did buy the Encyclopedia Britannica for
us." (laughter) But there wasn’t, and there was, I think, an assumption,
and I do believe that it was part of my early thinking too, is that I
would just grow up and get married and have children, and I was very,
very romantic, and I think by the time I was 11 years old, I was reading
everything I could get my hands on those old -- in those days, we didn’t
have porn. (laughter) But we had true stories, and all these romantic
magazines, and I imagine they have them today. And so that was where I
was learning about love and romance, and I was very, very preoccupied
with boys at that age, and so was -- but we also went to a high school
that was very, very high-achieving. Mumford High School, which actually
gained fame, because Eddie Murphy went there, and was in his early
movies.
-
COLLINGS
- Was it named after Lewis Mumford?
-
ARKIN
- Samuel Mumford -- Lewis -- no, there were two Mumfords, and they were
brothers. And ours was Sam [Samuel] Mumford, and I think Lewis Mumford
was the famous architect. And so -- and I don't remember what he did,
shame on me. I don't remember what our Mumford was famous for, but
something, obviously. But I remember being tested when I was like in the
10th or 11th grade, and I think that what the counselor told me was that
-- "Have you considered being a housewife?" And so, but I can remember
when I was about 14, I wanted to do everything. I wanted to be a
psychologist, I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be an attorney -- no,
not an attorney, but a judge, I wanted to be a judge. I wanted to be an
actress for sure, and a director, which I did do some. Acting and
directing. And I wanted to -- what else? A writer, I definitely wanted
to be a writer, because I was doing stuff like that too. So I wanted to
do all those things, and I figured when I grew up, I'd do a few years of
each. But my parents never -- I don't recall them ever encouraging me to
do anything.
-
COLLINGS
- But your brother was encouraged, right?
-
ARKIN
- No. I don't know that any of us were particularly encouraged to do
anything out of the ordinary, other than to do whatever -- I mean, I
think that my father fantasized us going into business with him, and my
brother did for many years, and of course my sister worked with him for
many years. But I don't think that I -- all I remember is that we can do
anything we want to, if we want to do it badly enough. I remember as a
kid, I did have a burning desire to be an actress, and to be a musical
comedy actress, because I loved to sing and dance. And we were always --
my sister and cousins, we were always putting on shows for our parents
at family events and holidays and so forth, and doing dress-up and stuff
like that. So I was really, really into that. But I don't remember
getting any particular encouragement. Now, even though I can't really
think of my parents as environmentalists, they certainly did behave in
environmental ways that I think got planted in me. I mean, there was the
victory garden; there were the walks in the woods. There was hunting --
I didn’t really hunt; I pretended to later, but I didn’t really ever
want to kill anything. But certainly target practice; guns are really
big in Michigan, as Michael Moore has reminded us, and guns were always
part of our lives, there were always guns in our house, handguns and
rifles. And I remember taking one without permission one time to go on a
hunting date; that was not a wise thing. And -- but we never killed
anything. (laughter) But today, I'm very radically oriented toward gun
control, so I do want to rectify that.
-
COLLINGS
- Was it intended that you and your brother and sisters would go to
college?
-
ARKIN
- I don't think so. I don't think I was ever particularly encouraged, and
there was certainly nothing set aside. But I did ultimately -- I mean,
to me, I think it was more the influence of the high school I went to; I
was not in any way a particularly outstanding student, I was a very
average student. But I do remember, one semester I decided to get all
A's, I just wanted to be able to prove to myself that I could do that.
And I did it, and then I wasn’t interested in my grades anymore.
(laughter) I mean, I was probably a C+, B- student; I didn’t have any
special academic stuff, I just really -- I always saw everyone else as
much smarter than me. And also, at that age, I was really intent on
being a clown, and I loved to make people laugh, and I was very, very
silly all of the time; I would come up with these like crazy questions
to ask people, and then they would -- and I didn’t sometimes even know
the answer.Oh, I can remember even as a very, very young child, going with my uncle
in his car, and it was a convertible car, and we adored my uncle, and he
was always playing with us kids. And he was this like really sugar-daddy
uncle; he would swing us around, and he was just always so much fun. But
he swore, and he was -- I can remember going in his convertible, and at
every stop sign yelling, just being five years old maybe, "Hi, goddamn
son of a bitch! Hi, goddamn son of a bitch!" because that's what I heard
him say, and I didn’t know what it meant. But people turned and looked
at us, and it got attention. So I was always looking to be, in a sense,
the center of attention in those early years. That's embarrassing to say
now, because I get way more attention than I think I deserve, and I'm
always kind of like, "Oh, put it on someone else!" But then I'm doing
this, aren’t I? (laughter) But anyway, no, I don't think my parents did
any particular -- no intellectual academic encouragement. So I actually
was in my first year of college --
-
COLLINGS
- So you did go to college.
-
ARKIN
- I did go to college, and it was --
-
COLLINGS
- Did your older sister go to college?
-
ARKIN
- Yes, she did. She actually -- she went to college, and she was a teacher
for many, many years. And she actually today is on the board of trustees
for Florida International University, and is a major, major trustee, in
terms of fundraising there. And she's also very, very involved in the
non-profit world on a very different level than I am, much more like the
kind you see in the society pages. But yes, so she actually I think got
her Master's in education, and she taught French for awhile, and she was
very involved in teaching. She lived -- both of my sisters and my
brother all lived in houses that were built by my father, in their early
years, in their family years. My brother didn’t have children, but both
my sisters did, and so they really had children in those houses, and
they were all neighbors in this development, where my father essentially
did this development, now going much further out in a rural area near
the lakes, because of course there are -- close in to Detroit, there are
just numerous, numerous lakes, and he bought up a lot of land around one
lake that was -- the land was all wetlands, but it was before we had any
laws about wetlands, and so my dad, in all of his innocence and desire
to accommodate, in his most patriotic sense, the returning veterans,
filled in all of the wetlands to build this development of quite lovely
little houses, and all these canals. He did actually keep -- got all the
water to go into the canals, and it was connected to the lake and so
forth. And so that was probably one of the very first developments in
the country to do that outside of the Venice canals here in Los Angeles.
And this was in the early '50s I guess.
-
COLLINGS
- And this was in the Detroit area?
-
ARKIN
- Yes. And so both my sisters and my brother all owned houses there that --
and I was the only one, because I was already in California by then. I
remember in later years, my mom always saying, "Honey, would you like to
have a lot back here?" (laughter) I never did get it, and thank
goodness, because boy, was it difficult to --
-
COLLINGS
- So do they all still live in that area?
-
ARKIN
- Well, my older sister lives in Miami, and for the past 20 years -- she
had a second marriage; she had her first marriage and raised her
children in that marriage in that house on the lake, and I would say
this about her, and I use this in the tours that I do today, I say the
statistic about in the 1950s, 1,000 square foot for a single-family
detached house, and I say lots of people then who as they became more
affluent added onto their houses or bought bigger houses, and I really
do believe that that was, in some respects, responsible for the
breakdown of the family in many households. And it's like all of the
sudden, you have this really small 1,000-square-foot house and everyone
can kind of hear what's going on with everyone else, and then all of the
sudden, you're in your own bedroom with your own bathroom with your own
TV with your own computer, and with your different mealtimes because
everyone's doing different things at different times, and so this family
is just kind of like an apartment building, everyone's got their own
thing going. And I think that my sister's house, when it doubled in
size, as they added on as they became more affluent, and people got
pretty isolated in that house too. So at any rate, it is all for the
better, because of course she loves her life today, and her two children
I don't think were particularly damaged, they were already adults when
that separation and divorce took place. And so -- let's see, what was
your question?
-
COLLINGS
- If the family still all lived back in the Michigan area.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. And so she eventually moved to Florida maybe 15 years ago, and
remarried there. And my brother, he actually moved to LA for a few years
and then back to Michigan, and he worked with my dad for many years. And
then he lived in the estate that they had about 40 miles from where we
were raised, because eventually my dad bought a lot of land much further
out, much more rural, and there was a big estate on the land that he
bought, and he and my mom and my brother lived in that huge house for
many, many years, which I'll be able to show you a picture of. And so
then he -- my brother also became a builder, and he built -- ultimately
he built a house about 20 miles further out from there, and today he
lives in that house and is trying desperately to sell it, and wants to
move to Florida or some other place besides Michigan; it's very, very
depressed, and it's very, very difficult to sell his house in this very,
very rural suburb, which of course, no matter what I might have told him
before he did that, my very different set of values; it's not like one
is going to ever remind someone that "I told you so." But at any rate, I
thought it was a poor choice.And my younger sister, after many years living in Michigan, she and her
husband moved to the Phoenix area, where they raised their three
children that still remain in the Phoenix area, and she and her husband
had moved to the Palm Springs area, where they live on a golf course and
play golf every day. Or she does, anyway. And -- but a very interesting
life, because it's very immersed in the social life of that kind of
senior community that she's living in, where they have dinners together
two and three times a week, and they're always doing things together,
and there's always a household of 20 of them some place, and it's very
interesting to me, that she, too, has in a sense recaptured that sense
of community in her kind of townhouse on the golf course, and my older
sister lives in a very -- well, that is very upscale too, a very upscale
condo in Coconut Grove in Miami, where she is still very dear friends
with many of her neighbors, and it's astounding to me: only my brother
ended up totally isolated, and we're all very concerned about that
isolation, because I knew, at a much younger than I am, 30 years ago --
where am I now? -- yeah, by the time I was 40, I knew that I wasn’t
going to have a family of my own. And I already at that time was very,
very committed to the idea of intentional community -- or I wasn’t
committed to it; I knew about it, and it was something that I really
wanted for myself.And so this organization of course has provided that, and I know that
whether or not I live out all of my years in this community that I
helped found or some other community, there are communities all over the
world that I can go and live in and that people would welcome me too,
and my poor brother doesn't have that. And so I keep trying to move him
in that direction while he's still young enough and healthy enough.
Well, young enough? 65? (laughter) That's so funny. Well, from 70, that
seems kind of young to me. But so maybe someday he will find something
where he's not so isolated. I know he doesn't want to be, and I think he
doesn't know how not to be. But that -- so he and I did not have
children.But I think that's really great, in a sense, because my older sister had
two children and my younger sister three, so of the four of us, there
were only one additional person produced. However, the production of
those five grand-nieces and nephews that I have, much as I love them and
adore them, between the three of them, they've had I think 11 more, so
my mother now has 11 great-grandchildren, and of those five
grandchildren that she has, and the 11 great-grandchildren, they are the
people that have -- they are all in living patterns that have the most
major impact on our resources. You know, people that live in affluent
America, even middle-class America, have probably 30 times more impact
on our life support systems that someone in a small village in India
might have, or Africa. And so this is a source of difficulty for me, and
oh, I think, did I not bond closely enough with my grandnieces and
nephews, and is it too late for me to do that? How might I do it, and
perhaps have some influence? And if not them, of course, lots of other
children and young people here. (laughter) But somehow with your own
flesh and blood, you think, oh, maybe you could have more impact.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah.
END OF AUDIO FILE
1.2. Session 2 (March 13, 2007)
-
- UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 2, 3-13-2007
-
COLLINGS
- Good morning, Lois. Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin at her office
at Bimini Place, White House Palace --
-
ARKIN
- Bimini. Formerly White House Place was my home, but now Bimini Place.
(laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. And the date is March 13, 2007.
-
ARKIN
- A nice, sunny, smoggy, warm Tuesday, two weeks before the spring equinox.
So we're still in winter, and it was 90.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, it was (inaudible), it was really hot.
-
ARKIN
- Interesting.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. So we left off last time that you were all grown up, so to speak.
-
ARKIN
- In two hours. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. And you talked a little bit about how your family didn't
particularly encourage you to go to college, but in fact you did go to
college, so why don't we pick up with that?
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. In my high school, it was a very over-achieving high school, and a
fairly affluent high school. So it was definitely the thing to do; I
would have been kind of out of step if I didn't go to college, and I
really did want to. And so my sister had gone to the University of
Michigan, and I had spent some weekends up there, because I had a
boyfriend there when I was in high school. But I think what happened is
that I went to Wayne State University, and I lived at home that first
year, and I met my future husband [William Arkin] at Wayne; he was a
very close friend of a cousin of mine Richard Zatkin who was also going
to school at that time. It wasn't -- he was a close friend, I should
say, of a distant cousin of mine; I think that's what I meant.And so I had run into this cousin, who was a second cousin once removed
or something like that, and he had -- and we started kind of hanging out
at college, and so he introduced me to my future husband. I don't think
I had any intent of getting married so young, but I was not -- I think
at that time, it was the '50s, it was the mid-'50s, if that, and I think
it was very fashionable, lots of my friends were getting engaged and
getting married, and I didn't see anything particularly wrong with it.
So I did get engaged, and then we got married I think a year later, in
March, 1956; I had just turned 19.When I think of that today, in the milieu of the young people that I hang
out with that are my community mates today, so many of the young people
that come on our tours, but of course, that was a time when number one,
one was definitely going to be a virgin when they married, and number
two, where you didn't live together before you got married, although I
have to say, in that first year of college, I think I read Bertrand
Russell, and he was the one that introduced me to the intelligence of
people living together before they got married. So I thought that was a
great idea. So my husband and I proceeded to have an open marriage, in
1956. (laughter) Because I was of the opinion -- I forgot what my
opinion was, but I certainly had a justification for deciding that our
marriage would be open.
-
COLLINGS
- Meaning that you would have other --
-
ARKIN
- That we were giving each other permission, at the front end of our
marriage, to be involved in other relationships. And obviously with the
full knowledge of the other, not the traditional way of cheating on one
another. But of course, I was very much in love with my husband, and I
had no desire to be with anyone else. So we had pretty much a ten-year
fairly blissful marriage, we were kind of one of those marriages where
everyone that met us just perceived us as being delightfully in love.
And we were, and -- now, we were -- that first year --
-
COLLINGS
- (inaudible)
-
ARKIN
- OK. Am I talked too loud, incidentally?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, no. Perfect.
-
ARKIN
- OK. That first year, we both lived in the suburbs; he actually, when we
were dating, he lived with his parents only a few blocks from where I
lived, where he had been essentially raised, but we had never met. And
he was four years older than me, and he had just returned from Korea. So
he was kind of war-torn, but he was going to college; he was
exceptionally bright, and he was majoring in physics and math. And he
had gone to a high school that was an art -- it was kind of like what we
would call our magnets today, it was a magnet for art. And is still I
think well known in those circles in Detroit. And so he was an artist,
also, and so we had that first year in college together, and almost --
no, I guess it was maybe toward the end of my first year that we
actually met and started dating. Maybe it was -- I'm not sure exactly
when it was. But then -- so we were married in 1956, in March. And we
moved into the city from the suburbs, that's what I was starting to say;
we had both lived in the suburbs quite close to each other, and we
started doing some other exotic things, like decided that it would be
really great to have a monkey.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, how fun. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- And so we had a succession of monkeys, none of which survived very long,
and it was of course before we understood the full impact of species
extinction and the illegalities of importing exotic animals and so
forth. We were just ignorant.
-
COLLINGS
- It was a different era.
-
ARKIN
- It was a different era and we were ignorant, and we were just thinking
how sweet and cute such a thing would be.
-
COLLINGS
- Just to take you back a little bit, you were talking about how you
entered into your marriage with your husband, the idea that it would be
an open marriage. Did you talk about that with your friends at all, or
was this something that was just entirely you?
-
ARKIN
- At that time?
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah.
-
ARKIN
- I suppose there were some -- yes, I'm sure, at that time, there was some
dialogue around that; it was like, "Gee, we're so young, and we haven't
experienced," -- or at least, I hadn't ever experienced anyone else, and
who am I to think that, "Oh, I'm the only one forever and ever that one
person should love in that way?"
-
COLLINGS
- Wasn't [Alfred C.] Kinsey saying something like that?
-
ARKIN
- He might have been, but I think the person that really was tremendously
influential on me, and I don't know whether this was before or shortly
after my marriage, I don't remember what the years that he wrote were --
I think it was later, actually, I think it was much later, was Robert
Rimmer, and also Heinlein, Robert Heinlein, in some of his science
fiction books, and particular Stranger in a Stranger Land. And I can't
even remember the titles of Rimmer's books, but they were quite popular
with the alternative lifestyle people, and more later, that was more, I
think, in the mid-'60s and so forth. But in the mid-'50s, I'm not sure
who I was influenced by, other than Bertrand Russell. I think that
Kinsey's reports came out about then, but I don't remember ever really
reading them, other than casually hearing in the newspapers that there
were sexual studies going on and stuff like that.But I think that I had this idea that love was not narrow, that love was
expansive, even then. And it may have been from other books that I had
read, but nothing particularly -- oh, I think the O'Neils; I do believe
the O'Neils had published their book on open marriage [Open Marriage] in
mid-'50s, and I think that was a powerful influence on me. But of
course, I had absolutely no experience or knowledge of how to be in such
a relationship, and I think my husband, perhaps, as much as
intellectually he agreed with this, he had no experience in being in
that kind of relationship either, and of course, I was raised with '50s
values and earlier of really being a virgin when you got married and all
that sort of thing. And he had come back from the service, and of course
had much, much experience with women, and was very, very handsome, so of
course, there were always women that were interested in him, and I think
he probably had many relationships that I didn't know about. Eventually
I did, though. (laughter) And when I did, many, many years later, it was
never the idea that he had been with other women; it was the idea that
he had lied about it. And even if he had lied about it because he cared
so deeply about me and didn't want to hurt my feelings, that he didn't
have enough faith and trust in me to be able to handle that.
-
COLLINGS
- So it wasn't the act; it was the cover-up.
-
ARKIN
- It was the cover-up; always it was the cover-up, which was not the reason
for our ultimate divorce, but it's worth noting, because we're still
back in my starting college, right? So that comes later. So in college,
I really had the -- that first year at Wayne State University, I was a
theatre major, and I think after that first year of theatre, which was
lots and lots of fun, but I was exposed to so many other things, it was
like, "Oh, goodness gracious; I really want to major in psychology. Oh,
no, I really want to major in philosophy." And so all these other things
that I was tasting for the first time in any kind of depth was very,
very exciting to me; I loved learning and I loved being exposed to new
intellectual challenges. Unfortunately, that first year I also took a
course in astronomy, because I was sure that I wanted to be an
astronomer as well, but I didn't do so well academically in it, and I
thought, well, maybe not astronomy. So I think the same thing happened
for me in high school in physics. (laughter)At any rate, so there was that sense -- I was very silly; I remember one
of the things that really stood out for me in that first year of college
was being in the play Gigi, and I was playing, if you remember the movie
or the play, I was playing the grandmother. I was 17 at the time, and I
was playing the grandmother, and I was always being very silly during
rehearsals and so forth, and my director, who was also my teacher, one
of my professors, used to -- I remember one day particularly, he was
really calling me on my silly behavior and not paying attention to me --
or my not paying attention to what was going on, and I said, "But Gary,
I'm only 17." And that was kind of my excuse for anything that I would
ever do that was kind of not reflective of the maturity of what a more
mature person should be doing.So, as I think I said earlier, in the last interview, as a child I loved
to be such a ham and show off, and I really loved to make people laugh,
and I didn't really care whether they were laughing with me or at me,
and I think that had to do with the protective coat that I had developed
from my sister's animosity towards me; it was like, that gave me a
certain strength in a lot of ways, and I thank her today for that.
(laughter) I think it also gave me a sense -- and I don't know whether I
said this last time, but as I played some of that back over the week, I
thought -- oh, it also gave me a sense of social justice, and a feeling
for the underdog, because I was the underdog in my family, in relation
to my sister. Because she was extraordinarily beautiful, at least I
thought so, and very, very popular. And so I've always felt the
underdog, even though I was not unattractive as a youngster, and not
unpopular, but of course, I didn't ever feel that I held a candle to my
sister. But so this business of being very empathetic towards the
underdog and to social injustice, because of course it was unjust that I
was treated the way that I was by her, and that she wouldn't let me
borrow her clothes when I wanted to. (laughter) And that she was always
coming down on me for how messy and I am, and of course I was, and still
am, and she was meticulous and still is. But she accepts me, and we
tolerate -- (laughter).So back to college now. So at any rate, I was exposed to all these other
very challenging intellectual and academic things, and then of course,
there was the wedding. Here is a very big thing that happened during the
wedding.
-
COLLINGS
- Your wedding.
-
ARKIN
- My wedding, yes. We were engaged probably for about a year, and had that
fun time in college, dating and so forth, being engaged, and leading up
to all the showers and the parties and the very essentially traditional
large wedding, and I'm not sure how my parents dealt with this, but
because my sister had just gotten married two years before, and I don't
think my parents were that well off at the time, but somehow they
managed. So it was the day before the wedding, I guess, and all of us
women were at the beauty parlor to have our hair done.
-
COLLINGS
- Your grandmother's beauty parlor.
-
ARKIN
- Well, no, actually, my grandmother was long out of that business. But of
course, my aunt and my grandmother and my sisters and me, we were all
having our beauty parlor appointment to prepare for our being so
beautiful for the wedding, and I had always for years envisioned how I
wanted to look at my wedding, and I had long, long blonde hair, it was
probably at least halfway down my back, and these are the things that
young people are preoccupied with, at least in those days, in the crowd
that I traveled with. And so I had this vision of being this kind of
princess, and having a long pageboy, that was my vision of myself,
wearing a pageboy hairdo. So the most that would happen to my hair at
the beauty parlor would be a slight trimming to shape it into the proper
pageboy that I wanted. But of course, the way I wanted to look was not
in alignment with the way my mother wanted me to look and the way my
grandmother and my aunt wanted me to look, and so they all conspired
with the hairdresser, and they began to cut my hair very short, and they
started --
-
COLLINGS
- That sounds rather drastic.
-
ARKIN
- It was drastic, and they started in the back, so I couldn't see what was
happening, and I just remember being so angry and so upset, and not
really -- I was a very unhappy camper. And it was very hard for years --
-
COLLINGS
- What an odd day to get your long hair cut short.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. But then, this is, in a sense, the kind of controlling environment
that I came out of. And I expect it had nothing to do with not loving me
unconditionally and completely, but their vision of how they wanted me
to look, they felt was more important than my vision of how I wanted me
to look. And so it was hard; it was years and years and years -- even
today, my mother would absolutely deny that she did that. (laughter) But
she did, they did. It was something that was -- stood out as one of my
more traumatic youthful experiences. And I think about the trauma in
young people's lives today, and it just does seem so silly, doesn't it?
And -- at any rate, so then there was the wedding, and there was the
honeymoon in New York, and there was coming home and living in our new
in-town apartment, the first time as an adult that I actually lived in
the central city, which I loved the city, and even as a youngster, I
remember loving to go downtown -- by the time I was 11 years old, just
to backtrack a little bit, I was able to go downtown on my own with my
friends on the bus, and I loved being able to do that. And so then it
was very clear, Bill and I always wanted to move to California, and so
we began to plan our departure for California.
-
COLLINGS
- Had he been out here before?
-
ARKIN
- He had visited in California; he had relatives here. And so of course, I
dreamed of coming to California always, since I was five years old. And
one of my ultimate ambitions in life at a very young age was not only to
be a musical comedy star, as silly as I was, but to go to UCLA. And that
was something I felt strongly about. So at any rate, we were -- let's
see, Bill was in his senior year; I think I was only entering my
sophomore year. And he was having a hard time with German, because it
was a requirement in those days that you had at least a year or two of
foreign language. And so it was very difficult. He was fine with physics
and math and everything else, but German just really stumped him. But he
didn't really want to study that anymore, and he was about to graduate;
all he had to do was finish this German stuff. And we just got it in our
heads that we were going to come to Los Angeles. And that we were going
to both drop out of school. And of course, in that first year of
marriage that we were in Detroit, I had actually dropped out of school.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, wasn't that sort of the norm?
-
ARKIN
- Yes. And I would see my husband through college. And so I got a job in a
-- well, let's see. I think when we were engaged, I was working in a
chemical and dye stuff company, and I would take the orders on the phone
and type in on this electric typewriter. And that was really exciting,
to use an electric typewriter. And I would take all of these horrible
chemical orders -- I mean, as I look back on it now, today, it just was
a very, very ugly kind of business to be in. And then, after we were
married, I got a job as a secretary in a commercial motion picture
studio. And I remember my boss, who was in charge of the studio where
they used to shoot all the commercials, was always coming on to me, and
that was very uncomfortable. And I was very firm about it, but that
certainly did give me a taste of sexual harassment; I really -- it was
just astounding to me, the degree that that was I guess kind of
accepted. But it was fun, because every once in awhile they needed to
use my hand or something in a commercial, and I learned a little bit
about the movie business, and I realized, oh, this is definitely not
what I'm interested in.And so then we came to California, and of course this was the home of the
aerospace industry, and it was very exciting at that time, in the
mid-'50s, or the late '50s; I think we came in '58. And we kind of
settled in southeast Los Angeles, near where Bill's relatives were. We
didn't actually settle; we were there for maybe a few months. And so
Bill was looking for a job everywhere in the aerospace industry, and of
course, getting refused again and again and again because he didn't have
a degree. And so finally he wrote a letter, because he was a very
creative writer, to Rockedyne, a corporation that was working on various
rocket engines and space engines for space, and he outlined an idea for
how to shield the rockets from radiation. And it was very creative; I
don't remember the science of it, but apparently it impressed someone at
that company, and so he was offered a job, even without his degree.And so we moved to the San Fernando Valley, and he became a research and
development engineer at Rockedyne, and I became a clerk at Rockedyne,
and we started living in different places in the Valley, I think in
those first three years or so, '58 to '61, we probably lived in a half a
dozen different places, because one of the things that was exciting for
us is to move into a brand-new apartment that had never been lived in
before, and to look for as many amenities as we could. So the swimming
pools and the park-like grounds and so forth, all of this was very
impressive for us. We just -- we didn't have many things, and that was
just kind of fun. And then on weekends -- let's see, it was still the
bohemian era, I believe; it was like pre-hippie time, and we would go
into Hollywood and walk on Sunset Boulevard and visit the coffee houses
and all the sidewalk artists and so forth, and so we'd kind of be these
weekend bohemians, eventually weekend hippies as the '60s came upon us.
But it's interesting to think about that. You asked me a question
earlier; I'm not sure if I answered it.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I think -- were you thinking at all in that time of your early
marriage about having children?
-
ARKIN
- Yes, the question came up, and we decided that we would like to have
children, but not right now. Oh, well, so anyway, so then comes the very
interesting story; I'm so glad you asked. So I think it was early 1959
when I became -- we moved here in '58, early '59 when I became pregnant.
But of course, I didn't know that I was pregnant, just there was
something wrong. And so we went to this gynocologist, and we had talked
about having children, but later. And then we had also talked about one
of us getting fixed, and then could we get unfixed, and that sort of
thing.
-
COLLINGS
- Because birth control was a problem?
-
ARKIN
- We didn't use any birth control. (laughter) And so of course I did -- oh,
maybe tried to be careful during the most fertile time of the month, but
my periods were so irregular, that was kind of difficult. So I did get
pregnant, and so we went to this gynecologist in Beverly Hills. So when
he came back with the report, I said to him, "Oh, no, not now. Gee, we
were even thinking of getting an operation." And of course, I was
thinking about Bill or me getting an operation to get our tubes tied,
but of course, the doctor interpreted that to mean that we were thinking
of getting an abortion, and so he hooked us up with an abortionist, and
I didn't tell him any differently. And I thought, "Oh, wow, that is so
cool," -- this a very, very respected Beverly Hills gynecologist, and so
we did have an abortion, and it was a very, very happy occasion for us.
And I remember being in the middle of the abortion and calling our
friends all over the country, and saying, "Guess what I'm doing right
now." (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Well, that's interesting. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- So it just -- it's stunning to think about that, in terms of what goes on
today. Just absolutely amazing, in that sense. And I've never, ever had
any regrets. Every once in awhile, I'll run into some very serious
pro-life people and let them know, because frequently, you hear from
them that every woman that has an abortion has regrets. And I never did,
so I wanted to let people know that. So at any rate, I feel that it's a
great gift to our planet, for an American to not have a child, because
even perhaps among the most low-income Americans, we are still, for
every child born in this country, using 15 to 40 times more resources
than a kid born in a small village in India or Asia or South America.
Obviously, the child is innocent of that, but I'm of the opinion that we
do the planet a favor by having less American children. On the other
hand, I can talk quite a bit about some of the issues with that sort of
thing too, as obviously, there's a serious population depletion in many
Northern European countries, and what the implications of that are. But
I guess we'll save that for later, right?At any rate, we did have an abortion, and that was 1959, I believe. I
would not say that I don't from time to time think, "Goodness, I could
have a kid about 45 years old now and be a grandmother, and perhaps even
a great-grandmother at this age." But somehow, it never has been within
my self-image, essentially, for to be a source of pride, how many lives
you've brought into the world. I don't take that away from my
91-year-old mother, who has 11 great-grandchildren. But I do feel badly
about -- and they're all just lovely, lovely children, but they are all
hugely impactful children, in terms of resource depletion. You do have
to be a little schizophrenic in this business.So there were -- well, Bill and I stayed at Rockedyne for many, many
years, from '59 -- or actually it was in spring of '58 to -- I was there
'til the spring of '65, so seven years, and went from being a clerk, to
a -- I think by the time I left, I was a planning staff person that
helped plan the development of new facilities, so they referred to me as
a facilities planner. And my final job there, I had the same rank as a
man that had had that position before me, but of course, I was paid much
less. And whereas he was a salaried employee, I was an hourly employee
and had to punch a timeclock. It was an extraordinary experience,
working at Rockedyne in those days, because you would walk into an
office, into the office area, and see not cubicles pretty much as you
see today even in large offices, but like a sea of desks, like two or
three acres of desks. And no windows; this was a secure building. And it
was a very amazing experience, and to learn the politics of how that
type of corporation worked.And it was interesting particularly because my husband, as a research and
development engineer, and giving presentations and so forth. He had
quite a different experience in the technical end of what the product
was about than I did in terms of a support function, in terms of the
corporation. But we certainly both learned a lot. He learned so much
that eventually, he decided that he would be able to do a better job
working for the government in the quality control function than in
working for the corporation, because he saw so much of the inefficiency,
the lying, the cheating, the ugliness, and he knew it from the inside,
so he switched over and became a civilian working for the Air Force in
quality control there at the facility, and did that for several more
years. But at any rate, in 1965, I was laid off, which was a blessing; I
had just graduated from college -- we didn't really talk about that
part, did we? So let me go back a little bit.As I said, we lived in about six different places in the San Fernando
Valley -- I'm not sure, maybe it was five -- before we settle -- and
along the way, we acquired two large dogs, a Great Dane for Bill and an
Afghan Hound for me. So we eventually, our last rental house was quite a
large house on a half-acre, where the dogs had plenty of room to roam.
But then the people who owned that house wanted to sell it, and we did
not want to buy it, and so we needed to find a place that would accept
us with our two large dogs to rent, and that was not viable. So of
course, Bill had the GI Bill, and we ultimately ended up buying a house
in Chatsworth, I think for $23,000, three bedrooms, two baths, two-car
garage, backyard, front yard, and only about five miles from work. Maybe
not even that far, I'm not sure. And so that's where we kind of settled
into our suburban life with our two canine children, and for the next
nine years.Eventually, once I -- it was 1965 I was laid off, and I had just
graduated from college and so had Bill, and he went on to graduate
school to do -- we had both changed majors in those early days, in 1961
when we bought the house in Chatsworth, we shortly thereafter enrolled
in Cal State Northridge, which was around the corner from there, and
went to school at night. I think both of us carried a full academic
load, and worked full time. And so that was kind of interesting, it
wasn't like a really big deal to do that, and I guess today it's much
more difficult to do that; I haven't really given it much thought as to
why it's so much more difficult to do that, to work full-time and go to
school full-time and run a house full-time, and some people do all that
and have children, too. I had one colleague at the time, a little bit
later at a different job that we had, she had five children, and she was
working full-time and going to school full-time. I didn't know how she
did it. (laughterBut at any rate, we did do that. We switched our majors; we took an
anthropology class together, and we were so impressed with our professor
that we both switched into being anthropology majors. I think Bill
really did want to get a degree, but it was never important to me; I
just loved learning. And after a few years, a counselor called me into
their office, and they said, "You know, Lois, you have enough credits to
graduate, but all you would need to do is take this one course, and you
would have enough to graduate." So I thought, well, nothing lost if I do
that, even if I was not particularly interested in that course, which
was health. (laughter) So I took the course and I got the degree in 1965
with a major in anthropology and minors in philosophy and psychology.
And Bill graduated with a major in anthropology and minors in math and
physics. And then he went on to do a Master's in sociology, and he
worked very closely with Lou Yablonsky at the time, who I think was
associated with UCLA, I'm not sure.But he was one of the people that was closely associated with Synanon,
and the drug and recovery home that was quite popular in the '60s, and
the Synanon games that people learned how to play. Group therapy was
really big, and all different kinds of group therapy; Marathon therapy,
the Synanon games, many, many different approaches to that sort of
thing. So Bill was -- oh, psychodrama, that was a big thing too that
Yablonsky was involved in, and Bill learned quite a bit about. So all
these things were very interesting to us, but I continued to work
full-time while Bill went to school full-time once again, and I --
shortly after I was laid off in 1965, I decided to take the exam to
become a probation officer with the County of Los Angeles working with
children, and that was quite interesting to me. I think before that at
one time, I had decided, oh, maybe I should become a police officer,
because I was very service-oriented, and I suffered under the illusion
of a really just police department and so forth. And I'm sure there are
lots of good people in the police department too.But I didn't pass that test, I guess because I was extraordinarily
honest, when the panel asked me all these questions, and I had opinions
and philosophies that were not in alignment with the LAPD -- thank
goodness. But then I took the exam for becoming a probation officer
working with youth in LA County, and people warned me: "Oh, it's a very,
very tough test, and people hardly ever pass it the first time." But I
did, and I didn't think it was particularly tough, and ended up working
in a detention facility for teenage girls called the Dorothy Kirby
Center in Southeast Los Angeles, about 35 miles from our home in
Chatsworth. And it was a residential facility, so I was able to work
off-hours, but it was nothing to drive those 70 miles every day, and I
didn't think anything of it. And there was really no traffic at that
time to speak of.But I loved working with the kids, and it was such an extraordinary
education, working -- number one in a public jurisdiction, and working
with teenage kids. And I learned in that position, because, although I
grew very close to several of the kids, and I had a great sense of
unconditional love for them, even the most troubled. And some were in
this detention facility for offenses that were so minor, they were like
truancy; they were being locked up for being truants, or running away
from home. And it was -- or experimenting with drugs or something like
that, but for the most part, very minor quote-"offenses"-unquote. Today
we would say kind of going through growing up. But we had five-day
group, and worked with the psychologist, each of the cottages had a
psychologist, and I was staff to a group of ten kids for eight hours,
for my eight-hour shift. And we did all kinds of interesting things and
played games, and went outside and had recreation, and played music, and
I certainly developed a love of the music that was going on at that
time, and the kids taught me how to do all these wonderful things and so
forth. But it was -- I believe it was 1965, and that was also the year
of the Watts Riots. And so this was an interesting time to be with these
kids, and some of them came from areas in South-Central where the riots
were going on. So there I was, and then I --
-
COLLINGS
- Were you thinking of this as a career, or was this just something that
was sort of interesting to you, the way that the anthropology classes
were interesting?
-
ARKIN
- I think it was something that was interesting to me, and it paid very
well. I don't think I knew essentially what I wanted to be when I grew
up; I think that in the aerospace industry, you work really hard, and
you do the best job you can, and I just remember an experience I had
during an engagement that I want to go back and tell you, but let me --
-
COLLINGS
- OK. Sure.
-
ARKIN
- And you work really, really hard, and if you work really hard, you will
always be promoted, and that was I think what I was raised with, to a
large extent, even though my parents didn't work in businesses where
promotions were standard, I think it was still the value that I grew up
with.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, it was around.
-
ARKIN
- It was the ethic that was around, and we hadn't learned yet that working
hard was not enough. Oh, I think we were -- there was this expression
for getting ahead in the world; it's not what you know, it's who you
know. And so there was that ethic that was there too. And later on in
life, I realized -- and that was always put out as a really bad and
negative thing, that you would get ahead because of who you knew. And
later on in life, I realized that hey, there's nothing wrong with that.
It's not exclusive to that, getting ahead is not only who you know but
what you know; it's what you know combined with who you know in a way
that is authentic, and is not putting other people down, that there is
nothing ethically troublesome to me about that. But that took me a long,
long time to learn that lesson, I think. But -- let's see, where was I?
-
COLLINGS
- You said there was something that happened in the course of your
engagement?
-
ARKIN
- During the course of my engagement, that had quite a very strong impact
on me -- I was not a person that was particularly self-confident at that
age, and I think that as I relate to my mother today, I see that she is
among the most self-effacing people that I know. And never putting
herself out in front of anyone else. And so I think I somehow had that
quality quite a bit as a youngster, except for the fact that I loved to
be a clown and make people laugh. So I think during my engagement,
perhaps I had put myself down quite a bit in relationship to my husband,
or my fiancé, whom I adored and thought was brilliant and handsome and
wonderful, and was I really deserving of this extraordinary person. And
that was questions in my mind. And I remember one day we were in the
library at my folks' house, and I said something very demeaning about
myself, and he hit me.
-
COLLINGS
- Who?
-
ARKIN
- My fiancé hit me, and he slapped me in the face. And he did that in a way
that -- "I never, ever want to hear you talk about yourself that way
again." So it wasn't to be cruel; it was like, wake up and recognize who
you are. And maybe he was also telling me that -- "I don't want to be
married to someone who's going to be putting themselves down all the
time." And so it was a very, very impactful action that he had put on
me, and then I remember years and years and years later, being involved
with a man who once hit me, and I said, "If you ever, ever lay an
aggressive hand on me again, that will be the end of our relationship."
And he never did, and he was very sweet. But at any rate, going back to
where we were, which was --
-
COLLINGS
- When you were working with the kids --
-
ARKIN
- The kids, yeah. So at any rate -- and you had asked me, had I thought of
that as a career, and I thought if I work hard, I'll get ahead in this
career. And so I had met a man during this period who was just a friend
who also worked for the probation department at the time, and we became
friends, and later lovers, after my husband and I separated, a
considerable time after that. And I think that what happened was that
this was now 1969, and my husband and I had separated. And so there were
-- no, first off, there were several years that I worked in the
detention facility and did well, and then was promoted, was being
promoted to a special program that was working with very small caseloads
of kids in the neighborhood where they lived in East Los Angeles, mostly
Latina gang kids. And we would work with them in the community, dealing
with the problems that they had, instead of sending them away to
detention for offenses that they could have been detained for, and tried
to work in the context of the neighborhood problems that they were
having. And so this was a new program; this was unheard of it.So I had a partner, and the two of us had caseloads of ten kids, at a
time where I think the -- today the caseloads are probably 200 kids per
probation officer. I think at that time it might have been 75 kids or
so. But we just had such a wonderful time. And we didn't have an office,
so we just had to make it up, and we often worked out of the backs of
our cars, and we took the kids on field trips to the snow, they had
never been to see snow, or to the beach, and so forth. And I can
remember -- oh, one time we had arranged for the kids to have free
beauty treatments, have their hair done and all that sort of thing. But
we decided we really, really better make sure they don't have any lice
in their hair, and we didn't have a place to do that. So we took them up
to the fifth floor -- oh, I guess we had a tiny little office at that
time on the fifth floor of the County Hall of Administration where all
the executive offices were, and we went in the ladies' room and washed
their hair -- this was on a weekend, so workers weren't there. And we
left those washbowls just full of -- lice were just coming out all over
the place. And it was just so funny when we stop to think about it.But we did things like that, and we worked with the -- we had to find
places within the neighborhood where we could essentially do our group
therapy sessions and so forth, but we frequently were in the homes of
the kids themselves. And it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. I'm
not sure, I keep hearing little rumors that that program is still going
on; I can't imagine anyone working with a caseload of ten today. But it
was great. And I did hear from some of those kids years, years later,
every once in awhile. And regardless of how much you think you're not
making any progress, that was one of the arenas in which I learned the
lesson of the delayed reaction. You work really hard, you form
relationships, you -- because I was already, as a young adult now, I
think in my 30s already, I was starting to learn the delayed reaction
lesson from my own parents, and finding the things that they used to
tell me over and over again about things that perhaps, oh, you have no
stick-to-itiveness, or you have to stick with things, or you have to
listen, you really have to listen, shut up and listen. My father never
stopped telling me how important it was to just listen, and all these
things; I was started to have learned those lessons now, and so I was
able to project that sort of feeling onto the kids, that maybe I didn't
see any real change in them right away during the six months or a year
or two that I might have been working with them, but I had faith that
they would have a delayed reaction, and that someday the work that I did
with them might have had some impact. And I did from time to time; I
didn't hear from all that many, but there were kids that somehow tracked
me down, which was not difficult, I suppose. But it was very gratifying.Then what happened is that my husband graduated; he got a Master's degree
in sociology, and I was doing a terrific job impressing the authorities
appropriately, and they wanted to promote me to doing a program similar
to the one that I had been doing for two years in East LA; they wanted
me to do a similar program in South-Central with African-American kids.
And I thought about that a lot, and obviously for a promotion and more
money and all kinds of things like that. And I thought about it, and I
realized that what it had taken me two years to do in East LA with
Latina kids, that it would -- had it been someone with my passion that
was fluent in the culture and the language, they could have done perhaps
in six months what took me two years. And particularly working with the
families, many of whom -- all the kids were fluent in English, but many
of the parents were not; most of the parents were not. And I think that
I realized the same thing, even though it wasn't necessarily a different
language, but certainly cultural differences and the black/white thing;
we were already deep into the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s, and we
were deep into the Bootstrap Movement and Black Power, and it was like,
this job really should go to an African-American person and not me. And
so much as I was challenged, and I thought it was really, really
exciting to do that, I didn't think it was -- from what I had learned,
that it would have been the best choice for the department to put me in
that position, and so I advised them not to. And about this time, my
husband had received an opportunity to do a fellowship for his PhD in
sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, and I thought that was
really wonderful. But by that time also, our marriage was having some
very serious problems; he was, from my perspective, kind of going
through a mid-life crisis, and I adored him so much, but I realized I
couldn't help him. And I wanted him to want me to go with him to St.
Louis, but he didn't really want me to do that.
-
COLLINGS
- How did you know that?
-
ARKIN
- Because he wasn't so enthusiastic -- we had already separated; he was
living a few miles away, we had separated, and I was living in the house
and he was living in an apartment, because we were kind of needing to
have some space from each other. And so he went on to St. Louis, and I
guess this wasn't quite where this job change had occurred; I think it
was actually before this separation had occurred, before I went into the
new job, working with the kids in their neighborhood. So yeah, so I got
a little bit ahead of myself there, getting the different pieces of my
life, the jigsaw puzzle to match up. He did go to St. Louis, and I did
work with those kids, and I believe that I, in 1969, we decided to sell
the house, because I really wanted to move into the city, and it seemed
like he was going to be gone for a few years, and I didn't know why I
needed that big house. One of our dogs had died, and so I gave the other
one away to a neighbor who really wanted the dog, and I sold the house,
I think for $25,000 -- today I'm sure it's worth a million. (laughter)
But I want -- I'm not sure whether I said this earlier in last week's
interview or not, but I wanted to just insert one thing, since it has
implications for who I am today, there were times -- I think I did say
it, when we worked on the lawn every weekend, on the house, and I think
that I remember thinking, "Oh, we should just pave it all over," so we
didn't have to work on the lawn, because I had all these memories from
my childhood where a big part of my chores was to pull weeds every
weekend during summer, rake the leaves, mow the lawn, and I just didn't
want my life to be about that sort of thing. -- I did mention that,
didn't I?
-
COLLINGS
- Mm-hmm.
-
ARKIN
- OK. So at any rate, we sold the house; Bill moved to St. Louis, I moved
to the city, I rented an apartment about two miles from where I am now,
still very central city. And then maybe it was a year later, maybe a
whole year later, that I decided -- oh, I was very, very happy for Bill,
because a woman that he had gone to graduate school with here at Cal
State Northridge was also going to do graduate work, her doctoral, at
Washington University in St. Louis. I thought that was so wonderful; I
was so pleased that he would have a companion. I had asked him once, had
he been sleeping with this person, and he said no, and course I trusted
that that was the case, but about a year later, I woke up one day, or I
was -- I woke up one night, it was in the middle of the night, because
sometimes when I called there -- oh, he had told me that she was living
in the same apartment building as he was in St. Louis, and I thought,
"Oh, that's really great; that's so wonderful, there's someone there
that he's a good friend and he won't be alone," and I was so happy for
him. And then I guess one night I woke up in the middle of the night,
and I thought, "Oh, they really are sleeping together."And I called in the middle of the night and she answered the phone, and
so I made some really interesting -- I asked some really interesting
very direct questions, and she said, "Oh, yes." I said, "When did you
and Bill start sleeping together?" And so then I was angry for a few
years because he had lied to me, and then I was very sad, too, because I
realized that this was a time when -- this had been a time for him that
in spite of all of our talk about open marriages and this sort of thing,
and expanded relationships, that he was really the one that couldn't
handle it. And even -- one time I was almost going to have an affair,
and told him all about it, and his reaction was, he was so unhappy about
it that I decided not to do that. And so it was really his difficulty in
all of this. So but -- and so I was happy that they lived happily ever
after; he got a divorce from me in Missouri, and I was very sad for
about six months, and went to group therapy for six months, and I had
started keeping a journal when I was feeling very sad at our separation,
and I think I -- in the group therapy, I don't think I ever talked about
myself, but I was always kind of like doing group therapy for everyone
else, and it was about six months when I just didn't feel that I needed
it. And then I said to myself, when I can read my journal and laugh,
I'll know I'm over it. And it was very shortly thereafter that I could
start laughing, and then I was really over it.And I was happy for him, and then it was maybe another year before I
actually started dating again and seeing other people and having other
relationships, and what I did, because when we divorced, Bill wouldn't
take anything. Unlike most divorces you hear about, where there's
lawyers and anger and everything, he left -- we had savings, we had
stocks and bonds; we were a double income, no kids kind of household; we
owned a house -- he wouldn't take anything. And I tried to get him to do
something that was fair, but he wouldn't. Must have been his guilt or
something, I don't know. But at any rate, I didn't know anything about
investing or anything or what to do with money, really, or how money
grows or anything like that. So I just put all -- once we sold the
house, and I certainly didn't want to be bothered with those stocks and
bonds that I didn't understand anything about, and so I just sold them
all and put all that money in a savings account, and then decided to
take a trip around the world on a cargo freighter to get my head
straight. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Where did you get that idea?
-
ARKIN
- That was where I -- people were using that expression at that time, "Get
your head straight." And so --
-
COLLINGS
- How did you know where to find this cargo freighter?
-
ARKIN
- Well, that's great. My parents were visiting, and we were down in Long
Beach at the wharf, and we were just kind of walking around looking at
the seals down there and so forth, and we kind of just casually
encountered a few women that were these older women, and they were all
excited because they were either just going or coming back from their
trip around the world on a cargo freighter. And, "Oh, wow, that sounds
really interesting," and I asked them for the information, and followed
up on it. And I guess this was in the early spring of 1969, and I just
made a reservation for the ship leaving in September. And then by -- I
had taken a leave of absence from my work with the probation department,
and decided I just needed a year off, and, gee, I could afford -- I was
very frugal, and I could afford to do that, and I lived in this
apartment, and decided to just become a bum and get my head straight,
because I was already in my early 30s, about 32 at the time, and I
thought, you know, I can afford to do this, and I'm just going to do it.So I did that -- I'm not sure that I actually retired very much before I
left on the cargo freighter; I think maybe I retired in July and the
boat was leaving in September, something like that. But in the meantime,
what I did do, I sold my car. Now, we always had cars, and we always had
two cars when we were married, at least during the period we lived in
the house. Why in the world we needed two cars when we both worked at
the same place, I've no idea. But we did. And Bill's father was in the
car dealership business, and so we always had brand-new cars, and we
were from Detroit, what can you expect? And so at any rate, I sold my
car, and I got a little, little Honda motorcycle, probably the smallest
one that you can get. Not small like they have them today, but -- it was
called a Honda 90, and I was very proud of that bike, and I rode it
around everywhere. I can remember being very suntanned, having this very
long blonde hair, because my hair had grown back, and always -- and
wearing very short skirts, because I had really great legs in those days
-- people tell me I still do, but -- (laughter). And riding my
motorcycle into downtown Hollywood next to one of those places where all
the Harley Davidson guys hung out, so there would be like a dozen
motorcycles lined up making that big "rrr-r-r." And I'd ride up in my
little Honda -- "Hey, guys! What's happening?" (laughter) It was a very
silly time in my life.And then I also remember, something that I remember quite a bit; there
was something called the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street in
Hollywood just south of Sunset, and a lot of people hung out there. I
can remember -- including just the beginnings, sometimes you'd see a
homeless person, or what we referred to in those days as a bag lady, I
guess we still do. And I can remember thinking, "Hey, that would be fun
to be a bag lady," and I didn't have a problem with that; I liked the
idea of being nomadic and homeless, I liked it a lot. Of course, our
values were very different then, and our problems were very different
then, than they are today. There was kind of the romance of the hobos of
the '30s and so forth, and all of the kids that were traveling all over
Europe with their backpacks and hitchhiking and so forth. So that was
kind of my vision, even though I was a little bit old to be in that kind
of younger hippie group, I called myself in my early '30s, "Well, I'm a
middle-aged hippie." And so at any rate, then I went -- I did get on the
cargo freighter with my motorcycle, and proceeded to travel around the
world. And we went to 25 ports, I believe; it was a six-month trip. And
we would get off -- the ship would be like our hotel. I lived in a
three-room suite that had like a bedroom, a sitting room, and a
bathroom, and we had wonderful food, and it was -- there were seven
passengers, and I was the only one under 60. So I was given -- I got
quite a bit of attention, as you can imagine.
-
COLLINGS
- From the crew.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. (laughter) And also was the cause of lots of gossip, so that was
interesting for the older folks. I did end up having an extraordinary
love affair with the captain of the ship.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my goodness! (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- Who became very, very protective of me as I -- I remember being in
Africa, I think in Guinea, I'm not sure -- no, maybe it was Lagos -- and
I remember him being very worried about me, and sending the whole crew
out looking for me. (laughter) But I was always the one that would get
out; it was very exciting for me, because I had really never been out of
the country, other than Tijuana once and to Canada when I lived in
Detroit. So when the ship hit Barcelona, which was the first port in
Europe that we went to, it was like, "Oh, I'm in Europe!" I couldn't --
it was so exciting. So I decided to get off the ship and travel to
Venice and meet the ship in Venice, and so I did that, and took the
train from Barcelona to Venice, I'm sure that was what it was. It was a
very amazing week that I had. So at any rate --
-
COLLINGS
- What kind of cargo was the ship carrying?
-
ARKIN
- It was all kinds. I don't know, quite frankly, as I think back about it;
I have no idea what kind of cargo it was, other than it -- whatever it
was, it socked my motorcycle in, and I couldn't get it off the ship
until we actually got into Greece -- no, in Yugoslavia, it was in
Yugoslavia that I finally was able to get my motorcycle off the ship.
And so I went -- I was so excited because we were in Split, Yugoslavia,
which was just an extraordinarily beautiful area. And I rode my
motorcycle around these winding hills, which were kind of like fairytale
views and fairytale mountains and fairytale villages, and I got to the
top of the mountain and there was this little village. And -- oh, I rode
up, and there was this little outdoor cafe, and there were all these
people in traditional dress at this big -- it was some kind of
celebration that they were having, and I was so excited to see all these
beautiful people in their native costumes, and so I kind of got closer
and closer and closer, and the language was English. And I was, "What
are you people all doing here in all these strange --?"
-
COLLINGS
- Making a movie. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- Yes, exactly. (laughter) I came 5,000 miles to get away from that, and
here it was. So it was kind of funny. The ship was a Yugoslavian cargo
freighter, and so of course I fell in love with Yugoslavians. And when I
got back to the States, I was always seeking out Yugoslavians for the
next year or two. I remember there being tensions on the ship between
the different ethnic groups, the Serbo-Croatians -- I didn't follow it;
I didn't really know what it was about, but of course in retrospect
there was -- that stuff was already going on.
-
COLLINGS
- So you went from the West Coast through the Panama Canal?
-
ARKIN
- Exactly. And then all through Europe, through Spain and Italy and Greece,
Yugoslavia and Greece and Turkey, and then back out through the
Mediterranean, and then down to India and Africa, and then back up to
Asia and Japan or Hong Kong and Japan, I'm not sure, and then back
across the Pacific and then landed in Seattle. And it was six months,
and in the middle of the trip, one of the cooks got sick and had to
leave the ship, and so I would go down and hang out in the kitchen, and
the food was so wonderful, and I tried to be helpful, and so I learned a
lot about cooking on that ship. I really wanted to help, and so they put
me to work, and I learned how to chop vegetables, and how to mix sauces
and all kinds of cool stuff that really hung with me for years after
that. And I consider myself a fairly good cook today, but I know that
certainly had some influence on me.And so then I came back, and I decided I really -- one of the things I
always wanted to do was learn how to play tennis -- really become a good
tennis player; I think I had dabbled in it, but I think it had
influenced me years and years ago when my husband and I had gone to a
park out in Northridge and just watched people hitting a tennis ball
back and forth, and they were so graceful and it was so beautiful, and I
decided I wanted to really become good at that. So I started going up to
Griffith Park where they call Vermont Canyon with a tennis racket, and
just hanging out and seeing who would hit with me. And so I did that,
and then eventually I met a young man who, like me, was just being a
tennis bum. And he was very, very good, and we fell in love. He was --
it was a little bit silly, because he was 11 years younger than me; I
think he was 21 or 22 to my 33, I think.Wait a minute -- did I miss something? Let's hold off on that one,
because when I came back from the trip around the world, a very dear
friend of mine, whom I had become quite close to during our probation
years, had moved to Spain, had moved to a small village in the south of
Spain, and had invited me to come and spend a few weeks. And I thought,
oh, that's really great, and so I went to spend a few weeks visiting my
friend in Spain, because I had just loved Spain when I had been there on
the ship. And I ended up staying a year, and that was quite an amazing,
amazing experience. Wait a minute. Am I getting this time frame correct?
Now I'm wondering if I am getting it correct -- yes, I think I am
getting it correct. And then I -- yes, OK. And so I ended up spending a
year there. It was a small village called Fuengirola --
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I've been there. On the Mediterranean?
-
ARKIN
- Uh-huh. You have?
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, yes.
-
ARKIN
- Oh, wow. Well, this was in '70.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, it was really nice.
-
ARKIN
- It was still -- you could almost have called it a fishing village. There
were a few tourists there, but most of the tourists were in Marbella or
Malaga, or Torremolinus. And so this was a little village that had not
been so terribly devastated by tourism at that time. And so we lived
there in this little house near the ocean, a block from the ocean, I
think, for a year, and she had two other roommates, and then I was a
fourth, a British couple. And what she was doing was she had started a
little nursery school for the children of foreigners that were living
there, and so I decided, oh, I'll just stay and help her in the nursery
school, the little kind of pre-school -- they were probably five to
seven-year-olds. And we were just a walk from an old castle, you may
remember it, it seems to me it was on the south end of town.
-
COLLINGS
- There was sort of a historic village off the side of the mountain, I
forget what it's called. (inaudible)
-
ARKIN
- Yes, it was just the sweetest little town. So we would take the children
to the castle, and we would work with them in our house, and other field
trips in the city and so forth. And there were three of us working, the
woman that was part of the British couple and me and my friend, the
three of us ran this little school. And what I experienced during that
time was what I call -- I can only call now orgasmic labor, who I later
met someone who wrote a piece on the concept of orgasmic later. And --
well, no, maybe not; I won't call it that. That came later. I'll call it
-- it was a time where people that were in a really good relationship
with one another learned how to read one another in relationship to
their work, so there was -- without any planning, there was always a way
that we picked up on one another, wherever the other person was in
relationship to the children. And we loved each other and we loved the
children and we loved the work, and so it was natural and spontaneous
and very organic to just be so in tune with one another in relationship
to the work.And so that was my first experience and my most influential experience in
working collectively, and that's what it ultimately was; I didn't really
know that much about it, but in working collectively. I'm sorry, but I
have to backtrack to college days, because in doing -- and then I'll
come back to this experience, because these were world-shaping -- these
were life-shaping experiences for me. In our study of anthropology, we
came across the concept of community, and -- if I talked about this,
will you remind me, and then I won't repeat it -- and my husband and I
discovered this spiritual community in the Santa Susana mountains that
we started visiting regularly, and wrote some papers on and met the
people, and they were very, very loving people, even though they were a
very -- they were a cult. And I forgot the name of the cult, although
I'm sure I have a paper buried in one of my trunks about them, or two.But they were -- to us as outsiders, they just felt so loving and always
full of hugs and always full of caring, and they engaged in rituals like
washing one another's feet and that sort of thing, and I just thought it
was the most beautiful thing. And because I loved -- part of my private
life was fantasy life, and there was a couple there who really believed
there was -- they knew, they didn't just believe, but some people have
beliefs that they put forward as knowledge, and others that want to be
gullible and want to believe, to believe them. And so they did believe
that there was a hole in the center of the North Pole where you could go
in, and there would be this utopian society that lived in the center of
the earth -- perhaps you've heard these stories before. So I really
wanted to believe that also. So they were quite influential on me; my
husband always questioned it.But then we also had one anthropology class, and this professor had a
following; her name was Dorothy Lee, and she had originally taught at
Harvard, and then had come to Cal State, and she had a following that
followed her from Harvard. And her -- the whole orientation of the
anthropology department at that time was called existential
anthropology, and Bill and I were in one of her independent study
classes with about a dozen other kids. And at one point, we were asked
to leave the class -- and Bill was always the scientist more than I was;
I was the believer -- because we questioned whether in fact the comet
that was coming by in those days was a god traveling through the
universe, and other people in the class really did believe -- some of
them, maybe not all, maybe if they didn't, they didn't say anything the
way we did. And so we weren't kind of in tune with the rest of the
class, and we were asked to leave the class. It was an interesting time
for anthropology at Cal State Northridge.So at any rate, I was this kind of believer type; I wanted to believe in
the utopian society in the middle of the planet. So where were we --
back in Fuengirola, I guess, and having this wonderful experience of
working laterally, collectively, in non-hierarchical ways, and of course
the experience that I had in the aerospace industry, which was
extraordinarily hierarchical, and the experience I had in working for
the Los Angeles County, although we had tremendous independence, there
was a big hierarchy there above us, and we did have to regularly report
and so forth. So this was a new way of working for me, and one in which
I fell passionately in love with, and I knew that for the rest of my
life, I never wanted to work for bosses again, and that what -- I didn't
want only for myself, but I wanted it for other people too. Some people
learn that lesson and decide they want to be the boss, but I never
wanted to be the boss; I wanted to always find people that I could work
that way with. So that was definitely a pivotal experience, the nursery
school in Fuengirola.
-
COLLINGS
- And it's interesting, the way you've always gravitated towards these kind
of group experiences, because I was just sort of struck by how you were
talking about working at the various jobs here in Los Angeles and going
on the trip, it didn't ever sound like -- you didn't mention particular
friends that you were talking with, other than your husband; you didn't
suggest that you were in any way lonely. And even when you went to get
married, you made a special point of saying, "I don't want this to be
just the two of us," you know? (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. That's right.
-
COLLINGS
- So it's striking that for you, relationships seem to be -- seem to need
to be larger than that, more oriented toward groups.
-
ARKIN
- That's right. And you make an important point there: as a youngster, and
even as a young married person, or engaged, I never, ever felt that I
needed anyone, and I didn't even -- I remember, of course there was the
teenage years, I think from the time I was maybe 14 or 15 'til I was in
my 30s, I had no need for my family, and no great love for anyone in my
family. There were certainly family reunions, but the teenage years were
very rebellious for me, and the young married years were -- you know, I
really -- I always saw my husband and I changing the world together, and
another thing that I didn't mention, during the marriage years, was the
fact that we wrote; Bill was, I thought, of course, a wonderful,
wonderful writer, even -- and I loved the idea of writing; I had always
written poetry, I think, from a young age. Not that -- I wasn't a
prolific poetry writer, and I was a decent writer for my papers in
college, and I got good grades, but Bill was a very creative writer, and
we partnered, and we saw our life together as writers that would enable
us to write and to travel and to do all the things that we wanted to.
And so we were -- we wrote short stories, and that was an era when there
was still a fairly substantial market for short stories, so we just
regularly sent out short stories in to be published, and we regularly
got our rejection slips back, and every once in awhile a personal letter
that would encourage us to keep writing.
-
COLLINGS
- Were you communicating with other writers? Did you --
-
ARKIN
- No. (laughter) Not really. And so that was a little -- I guess a little
aside, and I wanted to mention the thing about feeling like I didn't
need people, and the writing, and all these little pieces of the puzzle
come back. So let's see, we are -- how are we doing?
-
COLLINGS
- Good, good.
-
ARKIN
- Oh, great. I'll --
1.3. Session 3a ( March 27, 2007)
-
- UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 3, 3-27-2007
Arkin.Lois.3A.03.27.2007.mp3
-
COLLINGS
- OK. Good morning, Lois. Today is March 27, 2007. Jane Collings
interviewing Lois Arkin in her office in Hollywood.
-
ARKIN
- East Hollywood.
-
COLLINGS
- East Hollywood.
-
ARKIN
- Koreatown.
-
COLLINGS
- Koreatown.
-
ARKIN
- Wilshire Center. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Wilshire Center. (laughter) OK. You want to give the street address? OK.
Last time, we left off in Fuengirola, Spain. You had gone there to work
with a friend in her cooperative nursery school.
-
ARKIN
- Actually, I'd just gone there for a visit.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, I see.
-
ARKIN
- Ended up staying -- going there for two weeks and ended up staying a
year.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, yes. OK. And this was your first lived experience with intentional
community. And you were saying last time that you had found it to be
really fulfilling.
-
ARKIN
- It was amazing. The amazing part was the way in which we worked together,
because we were such close friends, and we had so much love --
-
COLLINGS
- Can we turn off that coffeepot? (laughter) Sorry.
-
ARKIN
- (laughter) Yes, let's turn that off. Oh, I'm so sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- That's OK.
-
ARKIN
- It is really loud, isn't it.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. There, that's a bit better.
-
ARKIN
- (inaudible). It's going to do that for a few more minutes, so I'll speak
over it. (inaudible)
-
COLLINGS
- OK. OK, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
-
ARKIN
- The thing that was so remarkable, I think I did mention this last time,
that it was the working together in a collective fashion; no one was a
boss. And we were all so tuned in to one another so that the energy of
one person, so if there was a hole, the energy of another person would
just move in there like a seamless puzzle, and that we were able to
support one another in that way in such a variety of ways, and it was
such a joyful way to work that I envisioned, oh, never again will I work
in hierarchies; I want to work in flat ways where we are -- we have this
kind of wonderful way of being together in our work, and to manifest --
[Khalil] Gibran talked about work in his poem on work, that it is love
made visible. And that stuck with me and stuck with me, and I thought,
yes, this is how it's supposed to be.
-
COLLINGS
- Interesting. What was the decision-making process at the --
-
ARKIN
- I don't remember that we had any; we were just so, "Hey, should we go to
the castle today?" Or, "Let's plan on going to the castle tomorrow."
"Yeah, let's do that." "Gee, I know this game we could do with the
kids." "Let's do that."
-
COLLINGS
- And how did you interact with the parents of the kids? Or were they part
of this group?
-
ARKIN
- I don't remember, essentially, but I think most of the parents of those
children were people that were kind of un-parented, un-parentlike, and
were just happy to get the kids out of their hair, because they were
kind of like expatriate people, or maybe celebrities, or whatever, they
were people that were not particularly interested in children, and were
happy to have them out of their hair. That's how I recall in my head;
this was a very long time ago, so it could have been something else. But
I think someone else kind of dealt with the parents, and I never had any
dealings with them. And we just kind of dealt with each other and the
kids were great, and they were very international, so -- I don't think
my Spanish was so good at the time, but my colleague's Spanish, my
friend's Spanish, my housemate's Spanish was quite a bit better than
mine.So it was just a fun, wonderful time. It was that experience of the flat
way of managing ourselves, and being able to do that in a way that was
very non-contentious and complimentary and respectful. And honest, it
had integrity; no one was just being nice to one another, we were able
to be who we really were. And have our other life, too; there was
balance in our lives. It was going to the markets every day, cooking
together, hanging out in the cafes, and working together. So it was a
very balanced and integrated life, although of course we weren't growing
food there. It was before that era.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, were these all women that worked --
-
ARKIN
- No, there were -- yes, there were three women. Two of us from the States
and one from Great Britain, the United Kingdom, London -- never know
what to call it. And then her boyfriend, who wasn't particularly
involved but was there. The woman that I was with from the States, we
had worked together with the at-risk children in East LA, and so she had
become my friend that way, and why I had gone to visit there at her
invitation for two weeks and ended up staying a year. So it was
fabulous. But also from there, I have the experience, after having
traveled around the world on the cargo freighter, I had the experience,
being in Spain for a year, of traveling pretty much around that part of
Spain, the south of Spain, and also traveling in Morocco, and having
that experience of -- I mean, Spain was a pretty different culture from
what I was used to in LA, but Morocco was, of course, much more
radically different. And I had no fear; I hitchhiked, and I remember --
I don't know if we actually talked about my being in Morocco.
-
COLLINGS
- No, not at all.
-
ARKIN
- But it was -- did I talk about my boyfriend at that time?
-
COLLINGS
- No, no.
-
ARKIN
- I had a Moroccan boyfriend, and he lived in Rabat, and we had met because
he was traveling in the south of Spain and had been in that village. And
so it was very interesting, because it was a time when [President
Richard M.] Nixon was in the White House, and the group of us that were
just having this wonderful time living in the south of Spain, and in
that time, the Vietnam War and all the other horrible things that were
going on at the time, that we perceived as horrible things that were
going with Nixon, which of course, as we look back at now, was a tea
party compared to today. But Nixon was planning a visit to the King of
Rabat, the King of Morocco was either planning a visit to the US, or he
was planning a visit to Morocco. And so my boyfriend at the time was --
his father was the jeweler to the King, and so all of us young people at
that time -- of course, I was the oldest among the young folks; I think
I was in my early 30s at the time, but most of the other folks we were
hanging out with were in their 20s. And so we figured out this fabulous
gift for the King to give Mr. Nixon, and it would be that the father,
Jacque's father, would design this exquisite golden screw, and the King
would give it to him, and we would -- the youth all over the world would
know what it meant.
-
COLLINGS
- (laughter) Yes, exactly. Let me adjust your mic a little bit; I think it
might be scraping on your blouse. There we go.
-
ARKIN
- OK. There we go. Yeah, so that the King of Morocco would give this golden
screw to Nixon, and everyone would know what it meant.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Did this happen?
-
ARKIN
- No, it did not. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- I didn't think so. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- But we all got a kick, and we've had many, many years of storytelling
about it, about the possibility of it. So at any rate, so I had spent
time in Morocco, in Marrakesh, in Rabat, and it was a very -- it was
just kind of a world-changing experience for me, because although I had
been in other countries and radically different cultures when I was
traveling around the world, I really -- this was another radically
different culture to me here. And I was very -- I retained my naiveté, I
had a wonderful and interesting pickpocket experience in one of the
marketplaces, so I then had to deal with that, from a foreign country
with foreign languages, and I remember being almost kidnapped and raped.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, great. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- And that was a very interesting experience; I always wanted to, wherever
I traveled, wanted to have the experience of going into people's homes
and seeing how they -- and feeling and experiencing how they lived. And
I was very open and vulnerable, and so there was sometimes, in other
parts of my travels as well, there was always risks involved.
Fortunately, I survived them all.
-
COLLINGS
- When you were traveling in other countries, Mediterranean countries and
some of the others, did you notice anything in terms of lifestyle that
sort of piqued your interest, in terms of sustainability or ways that
people were dealing with their daily routine that you noticed?
-
ARKIN
- Yes, I think everywhere I went, I noticed that. But of course, I didn't
have the kind of consciousness about it all that I do today, but I think
that it played -- certainly all of it played a role in my future life. I
remember being in Turkey, and of course just delighting in the children.
And so even though we didn't speak any language, they recognized -- this
was a small town in Turkey at that time called Mercin on the
Mediterranean, and I think since, I've heard it's grown into quite a
large city. But I remember getting -- I remember getting off the ship
and being in the streets and playing with the children, and then
somehow, they -- word traveled about this quickly -- I don't know,
whatever, in their language -- and then all of the sudden, I had about
25 or 30 children following me around the street. These children were
not begging, as frequently happened in other countries that I visited,
but they were just kind of joyfully --
-
COLLINGS
- Just having fun, yeah.
-
ARKIN
- Just having fun, and being -- we were kind of pantomiming back and forth
to one another and being playful, which I loved to do. And then all of
the sudden, the police appear to protect me and to take me away, because
I'm in danger from the children. And so this was quite interesting to
me. What was that about? I didn't feel like I was in any danger
whatsoever. And so -- but the mode of transportation in that town was
then a horse-driven buggy, and so that was quite amazing; there were
very, very few cars. This was true in some of the villages that I had
been in Spain and Yugoslavia at that time, in actual cities, there were
high-rise apartment buildings, but the grounds around them were full of
gardens and chickens and occasionally goats and cows. And so here we
were, oftentimes in actual cities that had all these kind of rural
realities all around them that obviously were providing a significant
amount of the food supply.In many cities, I remember in -- particularly it stood out for me in
Lebanon, the -- but it was true almost everywhere in cities; there were
the food vendors on the street, and I hadn't yet really begun to
experience that in Los Angeles; it would be in the late '60s, early
'70s; I think it wasn't as common as it is today. But everywhere, in
many of these developing societies, there were food vendors along the
street. So these were kind of small, independent businesses which were
very sustainable in that sense. The -- of course, so often the mode of
transportation everywhere was feet first and bicycles and bicycle trucks
and tricycles -- adult tricycles, that is, and there were taxis, even
more recently I think there was -- where was I? -- oh, I believe in Peru
a few years ago, there were these fabulous motorcycle taxis that were
essentially tricycle motorcycles but with carriages or --
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's a neat idea.
-
ARKIN
- -- buggies built on them so you can take two or three people. So that was
kind of -- of course, they were still petroleum-driven, so I would like
to see those (inaudible). Let's see what else I can think of. Oh, of
course there was some places, particularly in Africa, where one of the
main modes of transportation in the rivers and streams were canoes, or
different kinds of boats that they had carved out from falling trees.
It's very interesting, observing someone creating one of those little
boats. In one small, then-small city in Africa -- I think it was in
Conakry, Guinea -- I remember going from picking up a young man from --
I had my motorcycle; I was able to get my tiny Honda motorcycle off the
ship, and I picked up this young man in the marketplace over
(inaudible), young man, maybe he was nine years old, and offered to
drive him home on my motorcycle. Of course, I don't think I saw any cars
in that town at that time (inaudible). And I remember him, as soon as we
got home, he climbed up a coconut tree and brought me down a coconut.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, that was very nice.
-
ARKIN
- Gave him cigarettes --
-
COLLINGS
- Well, I don't know about that. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- Well, I was of course smoking at that time, and we'll talk about that. So
you know, in the anthropological lore of old, there was all this trading
with the anthropologist with the indigenous people for cigarettes and
beads and all kinds of things, and so I kind of observed myself being
the anthropologist and being escorted into his village, and talking to
the elders and so forth. But the idea that, oh, that was another form of
transportation is him climbing up this 50-foot coconut palm just with
his bare feet; how did that happen? (laughter) And to obtain food. So
all these experiences, I think, were very deeply imprinted in me, and
also had the hooks of all my anthropological studies of transportation,
food, water, shelter. And so these things I was seeing that manifested
those.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, were you looking for these things as you went around>
-
ARKIN
- No.
-
COLLINGS
- No, this was just -- OK.
-
ARKIN
- No, but -- well, I wouldn't say that I was looking for them, but I was
anxious to experience all that I could experience.
-
COLLINGS
- You were sort of more finding yourself and so forth than surveying these
kinds of lifestyles.
-
ARKIN
- Yes, but I had a curiosity about the people.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, a natural curiosity.
-
ARKIN
- And I remember consciously distinguishing myself between being a traveler
and being a tourist. And I was determined that I would not be a tourist;
we still had -- I still had in my head, and of course we do today, the
"ugly American," which was probably realized, I think, in the '60s, and
I didn't want to be one of those people. So I decided to tag myself --
when people said, "Oh, are you touring?" -- I would never identify
myself as a tourist.
-
COLLINGS
- I think you were a traveler. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- (inaudible) because you travel. (laughter) So yes, let's see. We are back
in --
-
COLLINGS
- Fuengirola.
-
ARKIN
- -- in Spain, so that time had come to an end, it was time for me to go
home; I was able to live in Fuengirola, I was able to live there very,
very inexpensively; I think my rent for my portion of the house was
something less than $50 a month, of course food was very cheap. And at
that time that I was there, having gone thinking that I was only staying
away for two weeks and I ended up staying a year, I was still paying my
rent in the apartment back home, which was about $200 a month at that
time, in the early '70s, '70, '71. And I was living on savings; I had
sold my house, as I mentioned, and my husband wouldn't take anything,
and all kinds of stocks -- oh, this is quite interesting. We had stocks
-- did I mention that?
-
COLLINGS
- Briefly.
-
ARKIN
- OK. Well, did I mention that it was an oil stock?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
ARKIN
- OK. We had purchased about $10,000 probably of the Trans-Canada Pipeline;
I had a friend back in Michigan who was very savvy about investments,
and so under his influence, I bought this, I don't know, some kind of
weird option that it would convert to stock; it was an investment that
would convert to stock when the pipeline was built. And of course, I
didn't, after we were separated and divorced, and he wouldn't take
anything, I didn't know anything about that stuff, and I was like, just
get rid of everything, turn everything into cash. The house and the
stocks and the bonds and everything. And so all that was turned into
cash and put away in a savings account, from which I figured that that's
what I would live on until the money ran out. I mean, I didn't think of
actually making investments that would make the money grow, and I didn't
know anything about that; I didn't know anything about money, period,
other than, you know, don't spend what you don't have. And at that time
until I had more charge account, and started -- well, we'll get to that.
But so, let me see.
-
COLLINGS
- It was an oil stock.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, so it was an oil stock, and I just got rid of it all. Of course, it
subsequently, obviously, the Trans-Canada became a very good investment,
and certainly one I would be horrified today to own. So on the one hand,
oh, wow, one could have become pretty rich had I held onto it, and also,
I'm very happy that I don't own it, unless -- or maybe I would have
learned by that time to -- shareholder activism (laughter), and gone to
those board meetings and complained about all the terrible things that
were going on in the pipeline. But so then we were still back in -- we
came back from Fuengirola, so during this whole time that I was in
Fuengirola, of course, I was paying rent on my apartment in Los Angeles.
-
COLLINGS
- And why did you decide to leave?
-
ARKIN
- To leave Fuengirola?
-
COLLINGS
- Mm-hmm.
-
ARKIN
- Because I could see that I needed to get back to the States. When I went
there, I was having the feeling that I could never really return to the
US, that it was -- of course, it was those terrible Nixon years, which
as I said is a teaparty compared to today. And I think that I already
had a pretty good idea of American consumerism and how unsatisfying that
was for me, and how cheaply I was living in Spain, and my knowledge of
how cheaply one could live in other places, and even eventually work in
other places, and so why would I return to the US? I had really nothing
to return, no pressure to return. Except that I had this apartment and
all this stuff that was in my apartment that I was paying $200 a month
for, and so it was time to really go back and do the best that I could
about being there, because of course I couldn't be spending $200 forever
on this Los Angeles apartment. So it was really time to return, because
the -- a year was enough, after having stayed for two weeks, and whether
-- I didn't think that I knew what I was going to do when I returned,
but I knew that I needed to return and tie things up. So I did do that,
and so then that was in 1971 that I did return. I guess I still had the
motorcycle. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- You brought it back with you?
-
ARKIN
- I think I had lent it to a friend in LA when I left for Spain, I had told
him how to get it, I think -- no, I do think that I had my motorcycle,
and that was my means of transportation for awhile. But I think then I
got a new car; I think my parents gave me a car. I went to Michigan to
visit, and they decided that I needed to have a car, and so they gave me
a brand-new car, and I drove it out, and then I had a car for awhile.
And then -- so here we were in 1971; I didn't know what was going to be
next for me. And I had this -- I think I had started playing tennis
before I went to Spain; I didn't get much of a chance to play in Spain,
or on my trip around the world on the cargo freighter. But I did play a
little bit, but I decided I really wanted to play a lot more tennis, and
so I started hanging out at the tennis courts in Griffith Park. And
promptly met a fascinating young man who I promptly engaged in a really
fabulous relationship with, and he was also a bum like me at that time;
I was truly a bum. And we eventually -- he maintained his place, but we
essentially were living together, and he was -- he played guitar, and it
was a time, you know, the music and the dropping out and so forth, and
so we just had a wonderful time for the next several years, being lovers
and making music and doing whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to do
it, just being on the streets and eating ice cream, and I can remember
things like standing over freeway bridges and looking at all the people
in jammed-up traffic thinking, "Why do people do this? Isn't this
ridiculous?" And just laughing, laughing a lot at how free we were, and
how being, in a sense, that stereotype of a hippie, because -- here we
were all free, and we have no responsibilities --
-
COLLINGS
- And how were you supporting yourself like that?
-
ARKIN
- Well, I was still living on my savings from all that stuff that I didn't
know what do other than to live, but very, very frugally, and having a
very, very high quality of life, but living at a very, very low income,
so I could make the money last as long as it would. And I had no idea
what was going to happen when the money ran out, but I knew that I
wanted to make it last as long as it could, and that I was having a
wonderful, wonderful time. And of course, I had gone on this cargo
freighter trip to get my head straight, and I believe -- I really did
believe that I brought a lot of joy to people's lives wherever I
encountered them on the street, because I was just really kind of fun to
be around and playful all the time. And then I would ask people
questions, provocative questions, in very loving and friendly ways. But
in that sense, actually -- I don't know if --
-
COLLINGS
- Do you want to get that phone?
-
ARKIN
- No. If you don't mind, I don't. And so asking people provocative
questions, and essentially engaging in civic dialogue on the street. And
I can remember like standing in a bank line and wondering, "Why is
everyone standing in a bank line?" And so I would sit down while I was
waiting and have conversations with people standing around me. And then
I --
-
COLLINGS
- Let me pause while the message runs. OK, here we go. And you were sitting
down in a bank line.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, and I would look up at people, and we shopped every day for food,
and we cooked together all the time, and we went to all the free
concerts and the free plays, and we knew everything that was going on
around the town that way. And we played tennis every day; we would start
out 9:00 in the morning with our tennis gear and go up to Griffith Park
and stay there for eight hours and play games, and hit balls with each
other. We were essentially tennis bums; truly, we were. I know it's
shocking to hear that about me, but I have to say that I did do that.
And this is an authentic oral history, and then come home and make
dinner and hang out; it was really a remarkable, remarkable life. Of
course, we had absolutely nothing in common, practically nothing in
common. He was 11 years younger than I was, and I thought that was kind
of absurd that we should have this relationship with that much of an age
difference. I think he was like 22 and I'm 33 or something like that.
And so of course it was never going to go anywhere, but it was just
something fun to do, because that was pretty acceptable to be doing just
about anything sexually in the '70s. So -- and romantically and so
forth, and so -- and he played music, and I loved music, and he started
-- and of course we had an open relationship. And -- (phone ringing) I'm
sorry about that.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, what years were --
-
ARKIN
- This is '72, I think, already '72. And -- I'm so distracted by that.
-
COLLINGS
- By the phone? Do you want to go get it?
-
ARKIN
- Let me see if I can turn it down, so that we won't --
-
COLLINGS
- All right, we're back on again. Yeah, 1972, around thereabouts, you were
saying.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, 1972. And so, as I was saying, we didn't have very much in common,
other than having fun playing tennis and his making music, and having
both of us be open to having open relationships. And so it went on for a
few years, and of course, he was not very communicative, particularly
about his emotions and what he was feeling. And I was of course kind of
over-communicative. (laughter) And then also, I always saw myself as
helping someone else to grow and develop and do personal growth and
personal development, and oftentimes I knew what was best for them. So
it was kind of a rocky relationship. He was Chinese, and born and raised
in Hong Kong, went to school in London, and so that was also, in
addition to the generational difference, there was the cultural
differences. And he was of course much more serious about the
relationship that I was. Fortunately, that -- I was able to recognize
that, and not have expectations, or try not to raise his expectations
that it could be anything --
-
COLLINGS
- And you'd never met each other's families, I presume.
-
ARKIN
- Yes, during that period, we did; we traveled to San Francisco. I had a
fabulous relationship with his mother and his brother; we -- one year I
remember we participated in making a float for Chinese New Year, his
brother was a graphic artist.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, how fun.
-
ARKIN
- We actually won -- our stuff won the award that year, as I recall, and we
traveled back to Michigan and stayed with my family. It was very open;
it was still just fun, though, I don't think that I was ever -- I think
that the key to that relationship truly was that we didn't make a
commitment to one another, and we -- every day was fresh, and we were
engaged in that relationship as if every day might be our last day
together, and so it made it pretty much very fresh and very, very
special. And so it was with him, I believe, that I learned how to really
love being what I referred to as a well-watered vegetable. We were so
good at doing nothing together, and we so enjoyed doing nothing
together. And so this business about getting my head straight by going
on the trip on the cargo freighter was really extended into this kind of
nothing, no planning, this kind of encounter each day as it comes, and
it was very special to have someone as beautiful a soul as he was.Well, at any rate, by 1975 -- no -- '75, I guess it was, '75 or '76 or so
-- no, '75, I'm sure it was '75. It was time for him to go on a trip to
Hong Kong to visit his father and his grandparents, who were quite old.
And so he did, and it was also a very, very bumpy time in our
relationship, and I loved him very dearly, but I was so happy to have
him go away. And if he didn't go away to Hong Kong, I'm sure that I
would have had him go away somewhere else. At any rate, he went, and of
course, we continued our relationship via tapes and letters, and he soon
thereafter met a wonderful woman who worked for Capitol Records, because
he was, at that time, in that year or two before he left, he had been
writing songs, just wonderful, wonderful songs, I thought, of course I
was biased. And so I had kind of thought, "Oh, this is really a great
talent," and promoter that I am, "I'm going to actually be able to
promote his talent." And so he met this wonderful woman who worked for a
record company there in Hong Kong, and soon, he became a small star, and
rapidly a rising star, and ultimately a very, very big star, not only in
the Hong Kong area, but throughout China. Even today, he -- well, how
old is today? I'm 70, so he's 59. But I remember, my sister and I went
to one of his concerts in Hong Kong in 1985.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, wonderful.
-
ARKIN
- And at Hong Kong Stadium, there were two posters, and Hong Kong Stadium
seats 13,000 people. And there were the posters of upcoming events, and
one poster was Frank Sinatra, who was performing for one night, and next
to him was my old boyfriend, who was performing for 13 nights, sold out
every concert. And when he traveled in China, people ride their bikes
for 40 or 50 miles to see him. So he's quite an amazing star, and of
course I felt very proud, and felt that yes, that time of doing nothing,
and personal development, even if there was delayed relation, I kind of
always liked to feel that I had something to do with that. Who knows?
Oftentimes those things are truly just being in the right place at the
right time with the right energy. And that was who he was and where he
was, and I was always extremely happy for him. But before I knew that
this relationship with Virginia was very serious, I really had decided
that when he comes home, I'm going to be there to promote his music. And
so in the meantime, in my do-nothing time, I decided I'm going into the
music business. So here I am, like in my mid-30s, and what am I going to
do? Go be a receptionist in a music company? No, I don't want to do
that; I need to be --
-
COLLINGS
- The president of the company. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- I need to have substantial connections in the music business in order to
do what he is going to have to have me do when he comes back to Los
Angeles. And so -- I remember taking one of his songs, and deciding one
of his songs was just fabulous. Oh, I know; I envisioned this song as
the theme song for the movie All the President's Men. The lyric was so
appropriate for it. And the tune, too; it was a really, really terrific
song, I felt. And so I decided, "Oh, I need to get to the director of
this movie, or the producer, so that this song can be in this movie,"
which I knew was being made. So I started asking around, who knew who; I
figured that oh, if you just ask around enough, you'll find someone who
knows him. And I did actually get a meeting with one of the major people
in at that -- I don't remember -- wait, what is it in Burbank, the
Burbank studios? I know it was in Burbank. So at any rate, it was my
first meeting with a big real honcho (inaudible).
-
COLLINGS
- That's pretty impressive.
-
ARKIN
- But of course, it was a hard lesson. What I learned was, oh, they don't
take new songwriters; they've got all these people that why would -- it
was such an important lesson, because it was -- for me, it was a lesson
of, in this city, talent is a given. Everyone is talented; don't expect
that you're going to get any special treatment just because someone is
talented or gifted. But it is this business of being in the right place
at the right time with the right energy, and no matter what,
persevering, and that's what ultimately makes it in that business, and
in any of the other super-competitive businesses.So at any rate, this was a time that I decided still to learn the music
business. So I went around, and what I decided to is to go around and
set up meetings with various companies, music companies, and I was going
to offer myself as an apprentice to someone who could use all my
extraordinary skills. And I was a very good secretary. And then I would
learn the business; I would be that person's apprentice, in exchange
for, three days a week or so, I would give them anything they needed me
to do. And meantime, I had gotten my own -- because my money was running
out fast, so I needed to work, and so I went and I created my livelihood
opportunity with the LA County Probation Department by being a kind of
on-call staff person, and in their juvenile facilities, so I could go
and work two or three days a week and then I could apprentice the rest
of the week, so it worked out just fine, because I didn't need very much
to live on; we had already established that.So I did that, and I ultimately apprenticed myself to an extraordinary
woman whose name is Helen King. And she was already at that time my age
that I am today; she was 69 when I started with her. And she had a small
secretarial business in Hollywood, and she was a secretary to the
California Copyright Association, and she did all kinds of wonderful
things for young songwriters. And she was really quite a radical
socialist, and had come up in the '30s, and knew all of the old
activists in this city. Just -- she was deeply committed to issues of
social justice. I think the environmental movement was not so terribly
strong then, but I'm sure she would have been, had she been living
today. She said, you know, when I came in and offered her my services,
it was like, well, why wouldn't she take them? I had interviewed several
people, but it was Helen that I was attracted to, and I think it was --
surely it was because of her commitment to the idea of young
songwriters. She ran -- her secretarial business ran -- was also based
on protecting songwriters' songs before they were actually copyrighted.And so this was a very special service, and she was already doing some
workshops for songwriters, and had a few people that she was working
with them or helping her. But I came in for three days a week, and was
available to her for anything, and so she sat me down inside her office
in downtown Hollywood, on Cahuenga [Blvd] and Hollywood Boulevard, and
one of those wonderful old buildings. And she sat me down in her office
with a typewriter and a little typewriter stand, and she said, "Now,
you're welcome to listen to anything I'm doing on my phone or in my
meetings, and I'll just give you things to type for me." And so that's
what I did. So I'd be sitting there typing away -- address labels, that
was one, we used to have address labels for our newsletters and things.And one day, I'm sitting there overhearing a conversation that sounded
very interesting, and once she got off the phone, she said, "How would
you like to meet with Peter Yarrow and I tomorrow night, to talk about
doing a music concert?" And I just -- my jaw just dropped. Peter Yarrow?
Like one of my really -- from Peter, Paul and Mary, you know. And just
one of my most favorite groups in the whole world, so of course I was
very excited about doing that. And so we did have a series of meetings,
and we essentially created the Festival of New Music for that group. Oh,
one thing that precedes this -- no, I guess it's OK; I'll go back to it.
So working with Peter and a group of volunteers with Helen, I've learned
how to do music concerts -- actually, our concerts were to be able to
promote music that was written from the heart, rather than for the
charts. And we screened -- we set up a screening device, and it
essentially was a contest, and we received songs from all over the
country, and had two or three different levels of screening, and then
presented these concerts. I believed that essentially, that that was the
work that preceded the American Song Festival, and essentially, when we
stopped doing it, the American Song Festival took over this concept. But
we had several concerts in big auditoriums downtown; I think we did the
Embassy Auditorium downtown, and we did at the -- oh, what's the one on
Wilshire?
-
COLLINGS
- Wiltern?
-
ARKIN
- Not the Wiltern, but the one just west of that. The -- oh, I'm going
blank on it. Anyway, big local theatre. And it was just such an
extraordinary experience for me, to be able to learn that. The other
thing -- so that was a very, very important aspect of my training; I
learned how to do bookkeeping and how to set up, how to work with
volunteers, how to produce a concert, how to produce a monthly seminar,
we used to monthly seminars for the California Copyright Association.
And at these seminars, the songwriters, all of the songwriters would
come, the songwriters whose music I grew up with in the '40s and '50s,
and I couldn't really believe I was meeting all these people, it was so
extraordinary. And then also on the forums we did, the songwriters who
were writing the music today. And it was always just such a treat for me
too. And obviously, I was getting very well positioned for my returning
lover. (laughterBut also, the work that we did in the social justice community was
phenomenal; Helen was always there when people were calling on her with
issues of hunger and injustices of all kinds. And then we would put the
resources of her little secretarial service behind that. And meantime,
her dream was to essentially create a non-profit organization, but she
had never quite made it happen. And so there I was at that time, and
decided, yes, this is something you need to make happen, and so I really
did all the research and the follow-through to essentially make her
dream come true of having a non-profit songwriters' resources and
services organizations.So it was called SRS, and it went on for at least 20 years after I left
the organization in 1980, which I'll speak about in a moment, and it was
later renamed the National Academy of Songwriters, and it really grew to
-- initially, under my tutelage, but continuing to do so, I think to a
fairly major national membership organization as a songwriter service
organization. But meantime, this was 1978 now, and Helen had become
quite ill, my mentor who I was learning so much from; she had become
quite ill. And she died shortly thereafter, in October.Also, I should mention that since songwriter boyfriend was away, I had
taken on another very important person in my life, a young man whose
name was Carl . He was in law school at that time and he owned a small
bookstore in the area that I used to kind of stop by on my motorcycle on
the way to playing tennis, and so we had struck up quite a wonderful
relationship and were seeing each other quite a bit, and very intimate
and wonderful relationship. And so a certain -- and it was bumpy from
time to time; he had taken the Bar, and he was waiting for results from
the Bar, and so meantime, when -- this was when Helen had taken sick,
maybe six to eight months prior -- he knew all the people in the office,
and he was very well-loved; he was really a wonderful, wonderful person.So we brought him in to work in the organization that summer in that
Songwriters' Resources and Services, and he got along well with
everyone. And meantime, I was not getting along well with everyone
there, because I really wanted us, from the very beginning I had this
vision of all of us working laterally, instead of hierarchically, and no
one else really wanted to do that. And I had a vision of how we could do
this, and I kept trying to share that vision with everyone, and no one
believed in it, and it was so frustrating for me. And because of what I
carried with me from Spain --
-
COLLINGS
- Well, how did Helen feel about it?
-
ARKIN
- Well, Helen was fine, and she was already kind of very sick and out of
picture, but Helen of course loved it; she was a major person interested
in issues of justice, so of course, why wouldn't she, what's not to
love? And these people had essentially become -- I think had been hired
after -- I don't know, maybe this is -- I'm getting a little bit mixed
up in my timeline there, but Helen died, and Carl was working there now
kind of coordinating and everything in the organization, and I was kind
of not working there now because now Carl was there, and I didn't really
need to be there. And but then -- oh, no, but then what happened is,
three months after Helen died, Carl died.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, my goodness.
-
ARKIN
- And so this was quite shocking for me, and --
-
COLLINGS
- What did -- how did he die?
-
ARKIN
- And Carl was 37 at the time; I was already in my early 40s -- 41 or 42,
and he had been born with a heart condition, and he used to say things
like, "Someday my doctor says I should have a heart operation, but
nothing to worry about now." And we had been out the night before to a
movie and to dinner, and he wanted me to come stay over at his place, he
lived a few miles from where I lived, and we would kind of go back and
forth to one another's places. And I said, "Oh, you know, I feel like
I'm coming down with a cold or something, so not tonight." So I went
home to bed, and the next day, work called, the office called me and
said, "Do you know where Carl is?" And I said -- because he was
extremely reliable, he would never not show up to work without calling.
So I said, "No, we were out last night and everything was fine, so I'm
sure -- maybe he just overslept," and so forth. So an hour later, they
called again, and then I was really starting to get worried, this is
very strange. So I went over to his place, and I opened the door,
because I had a key there, and I heard the television going on upstairs
in the bedroom, and so I went up, and I saw that on his bed, there was
kind of a hump of blankets, and I thought, "Oh, he's just playing," and
it was just a hump of blankets. And then I walked to the bathroom, and
he was spread out on the floor in the bathroom, and I couldn't -- I knew
he was dead immediately. And so it was just a horrible, horrible thing
to discover that.
-
COLLINGS
- Absolutely, my goodness.
-
ARKIN
- And so then I had two deaths to grieve about. And I wasn't really doing
anything at that point, and I think I had kind of dropped out of that
organization and was trying to figure out what I was going to do now,
and meantime, long before that, my old boyfriend had become already
quite famous in Hong Kong and was (inaudible), and had really this
wonderful relationship with Virginia, so that wasn't really going to
happen for me anymore, even though we remained friends. And so I went
back to the songwriter organization and promptly, the week after Carl's
death, and said, "I am here to provide continuity to this organization,"
because everyone else was relatively new, the full-time staff. And
actually, we had a CETA program at that time; we had actually
essentially replaced me with three staff under that government-funded
program for the arts. And so they were acceptable to my coming back and
providing this continuity to this organization, which I then did for
another two years or so. And then, interestingly enough, we had a
retreat, we had a board retreat -- this was in 1980, I believe -- and I
had already started the CRSP organization. CRSP stands for Cooperative
Resources and Services Project, which was the original name of this
organization, based on Songwriters' Resources and Services, based on
everything I learned there, that's what we would ultimately do for
co-ops, but I'll get to that in a minute. So let me see, I forgot where
I was.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you had gone back to provide continuity for the organization.
ARKIN: So we had this retreat of the board, and I remember, it was Flo
Green, who now is the executive director of the California Association
of Non-Profits, a very wonderful statewide organization that provides
services to non-profits, and very well-known to the non-profits. At that
time she was essentially doing more training with various non-profits,
and so she was our retreat trainer. And she was -- I just found her so
remarkable, and I remember part of the board retreat question that was
being asked to board members was, what is your interpretation of the
vision of this organization, and you would write that -- for the purpose
of this organization, and you would write that in one side of a
three-by-five card, and on the other side, you would write, "Why am I
here?"And so this was an exercise for me, and I realized from that retreat that
I didn't need to be there anymore, and that that vision was -- or that
purpose was just fine without me, and so I was able to separate easily
from the board at that point, and from the organization. So then, what I
had learned from Helen is that she was very, very interested in
cooperatives, and she wanted to create a cooperative publishing company.
And what one of my assignments was to learn all I could about
cooperatives, and how would we create a cooperative publishing company.In the process of learning about that, of course I learned about
cooperatives, and, wow! How come I never knew about this before? It
combined the best qualities of the for-profit world and the non-profit
world, and the public sector; it was like just a remarkable, exciting
thing for me, and I decided at this time -- this was maybe 1979 -- even
though I said earlier I didn't know what I was going to do, I knew I
wanted to devote a segment of my life to cooperatives, but I didn't know
exactly what form that would take. And so when the separation from SRS
was final, essentially what I did was I started going to co-op
conferences all over the country, and learning -- meeting all the people
that I could in the movement, and recognizing, and of course first
trying to find out all that I could about co-ops in the Los Angeles
area, and I realized there was nothing going on, it was just -- well,
there were a few things going on, but nothing I could really put my
fingers on, and that I realized that by that time, I knew probably as
much as anyone in this city about cooperatives.Of course, I was fooling myself; there were a few people that were very
knowledgeable about cooperatives in the city, and I did find out who
they were, and they became my co-op mentors, really. People like David
Thompson and Jerry Voorhis, a former US Congressman, became my most
important mentor. And he lived out in Claremont, and had been the
founder -- one of the main people in the Cooperative League of the USA,
which is now the National Cooperative Business Association, and had been
involved in international co-op development. He was also the first
Congressman that was defeated by Richard Nixon, and he wrote books about
it. He was also a Congressman that was voted the most honest, most --
highest integrity Congressman several years running, I believe.But of course, [Richard M.] Nixon had extraordinary lie machines set up
about Jerry Voorhis being a Communist and being a Socialist and all
kinds of terrible, terrible things, and he was just a remarkable human
being whose life touched so many different people in so many different
organizations worldwide. And a beautiful, beautiful person. And so he
became my co-op mentor also, after Helen [King] died, and after I
decided to create this organization, and he eventually donated his
library to us, and so many of the books you see in this resource center
are from Jerry Voorhis. And -- oh, my.
-
COLLINGS
- Let me just ask you a very general question. Was it an unusual thing to
go to these record executives and offer to be an apprentice? Was that
something that seemed surprising to them, or was that a common practice?
-
ARKIN
- Well, I think it was; I don't think that people really did that sort of
thing, I don't even hear about people doing that sort of thing today,
although I often recommend it to people who really want to learn
something in-depth and they want to learn it quickly, I tell them, go
get your livelihood in order, and apprentice yourself to someone,
assuming they had the wherewithal to benefit from such an
apprenticeship, and so --
-
COLLINGS
- So where did you get that idea, do you think?
-
ARKIN
- Well, you know, things just come out of the -- who knows? You channel
them, or whatever; the mother of necessity is -- need is the mother of
--
-
COLLINGS
- -- invention.
-
ARKIN
- -- invention. And you learn to -- it's amazing, because as you do more
and more, and as your time gets less and less, the more creative you
become, and -- or if you -- and this is one of the reasons that I think
frequently, people that complain about money being a problem all the
time; I kind of perceive that among a lot of people as simple
poverty-consciousness, not all, of course, sometimes it's really an
important thing. But people do not perceive themselves as the creative
human beings that we all are, and sometimes, if you have too much money
too quickly -- if you have vision, and you have too much money too
quickly, sometimes you lose your creativity, you really do. And this is
just a remarkable experience that I wouldn't have traded for anything. I
don't think that anyone was particularly surprised; I don't remember
actually being offered an apprenticeship by anyone --
-
COLLINGS
- Other than Helen.
-
ARKIN
- And it's fuzzy in my mind, but even though she was a for-profit sole
proprietorship secretarial service at the time that I applied to her,
she was functioning as a non-profit, doing public interest work. I don't
think any of the others were, and so it was really my choice rather than
anyone else's choice, that I saw the issue of social responsibility as
important as learning the business, and the fact that she had it meant a
lot to me. And so -- but I still think it's -- someone had the right
stuff on their resume, and has the persuasiveness to have conversations
with executives that they would like to do that with; I think there's
got to be lots of opportunities -- obviously in this day and age, you
have to prove that you're trustworthy of that position, but I think that
it's possible.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you and Helen sound like a match made in heaven.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, she was just a --
-
COLLINGS
- That was wonderful turning point.
-
ARKIN
- -- wonderful woman, yeah. And then I also met some very close -- it was
through Helen that I met people like David Arkin, who is the father of
Alan and Adam, and the grandfather of Adam, and he was a remarkable
songwriter, a wonderful songwriter and social activist, and his wife,
Bea, they were both very strong social activists, very active in the
Unitarian Church, and just so many wonderful people that -- oh, another
woman that I had met through Helen was Harriet Smith; she was a peer of
Helen's, and she had a very large home in Hancock Park, their daughters
had been best friends.And so Harriet came on my board of directors, the Cooperative Resources
and Services project, I invited her on mine, and she had this very large
home in Hancock Park, so many of our early events were held in her home,
which was a wonderful place, and she was such a gracious and loving
hostess; she had also -- she was very active with KCET and the
Experiment in Living, the international student exchange, and really a
remarkable woman in her own right; her husband had been a banker, and
had died many years before. And she was also very committed to issues of
social justice and art and so forth. So these were, you know, a way of
my really becoming comfortable in levels of society that through my
early years and my hippie years, it was -- these were oftentimes people
that were --
-
COLLINGS
- Sold out?
-
ARKIN
- Very kind of strange people to me. And so it was recognition that I had
something to offer in my friendship with those people as well as in
their friendships with me, and it was a way of really developing a
tremendous sense of confidence. And what I learned also again and again
from working with Helen was, I didn't know how to do certain things, but
if you make a commitment out in time, then somehow you're going to
figure out how to back up and do all the things that you need to do to
make that commitment, whether it was a seminar or a conference or a
workshop, a concert, that you were going to figure out how to -- and
also to develop the confidence to -- even of writing funding proposals,
oh, how do you do that? I don't know; I never went to a grant-writing
workshop and I never did much of that, but I could see that, oh, just
get a copy of someone else's that was successful and then adapt it to
your need. So this kind of adaptive ability was ingrained in me.And I think as a child, and I think I mentioned this earlier, I remember
feeling and being instilled by my parents, "You can do anything you want
to, if you want to do it badly enough." And out of that, I can even
remember -- I'm not sure I mentioned this -- oh, I can even remember
looking at freeway bridges, because the curve of bridges and their
circles, and then at that time, even later in the '60s and '70s when the
freeways started becoming more and more complex, with four different
levels, the downtown -- the four-level bridge downtown, I can remember
thinking -- this is so interesting that I would be thinking this,
because you'll hear what I have to say about cars later on, "These
bridges are so exquisite," and the curves, and I can remember, "I can do
that." I can remember feeling anything that any human being can do, I
can do too. And what a gift that was. And it is that more so than any
other gift that my parents gave me, that makes me a person of privilege.
Had they been millionaires, I would not have been as much a person of
privilege as the gift of knowing that I could do anything that I put my
mind to. And so that is what I think privilege is made up of. Is this a
good place to --?
-
COLLINGS
- OK. All right, OK.
-
ARKIN
- (laughter) I don't know if --
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. Let's see, let's --
END OF Arkin.Lois.3A.03.27.2007.mp3
1.4. Session 3b ( March 27, 2007)
-
- UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 3B, 3-27-2007
Arkin.Lois.3B.03.27.2007.mp3
-
COLLINGS
- OK, we're back on.
-
ARKIN
- There's one other very, very important mentor in my life. Well, probably
many more after this, but this person -- I talked about Helen and Jerry
and my parents, but this person -- his name is Warren Christensen. And
Warren -- I met Warren in 1971, when I was still involved with my young
songwriter lover, and we had gone -- he had started something at his
house called the Carriage House, which was adjacent to USC, and he had
been a theatre arts major at USC, and he had started something called
the Garden Theatre Festival. And it started in his backyard, at his
house. And it was such a wonderful event, and in his -- or maybe it was
his front yard, I don't know.But anyway, there was enough space that there could be several stages,
several different performing stages, and so you might have a
singer/songwriter over here, and you might have a poet over there and a
comedian over, and they were all doing their work, there was just all
this activity. And he had patterned it after some wonderful festival in
Europe, someplace -- I'm not sure which one it was.But I remember visiting in his -- when I went there and saw what was
happening, I remember it being so inspiration to me. And then when I
went in his office and saw the entire three-week program -- or, I don't
know, maybe it was only ten days at that time, or maybe it was three
weekends, or I'm not sure exactly what, but I saw the whole program laid
out in little pieces of paper on his floor, because he didn't have a
desk so big, and it was like, I just -- oh, my gosh, the organizational
genius of this person, and the program of course reflected this
beautiful artistic program that was handed out to people as they came to
this free front yard or backyard festival. It was so impressive to me,
and I immediately developed a wild crush on Warren Christensen -- I was
not alone. (laughter) And so -- because of his organizational genius.
And so I wanted to really work with Warren, of course.So I eventually after -- I think he staged this festival every year; for
a few years it was at his carriage house near USC, and then eventually,
he made arrangements with the city to have it at Barnsdall Park. And
that was, oh, just so wonderful. I'm not sure what year it started going
to Barnsdall, maybe '73, '74, '75. Maybe it was '75, '76, '77. But I
volunteered to help him with the Festival, and there was some connection
with the Songwriters' organization there too, and it might have actually
been that I worked more close with him after I was working with the
Songwriters' organization on providing talent and so forth, because at
Barnsdall, there were also many, many stages going all the time. It was
fabulous, and it was also a time when the CETA program had come in a big
way to Los Angeles. CETA, standing for the Comprehensive Employment and
Training Program. And Warren was the first person to use that program
for the arts in Los Angeles. And it was through Warren's work with the
arts that the arts really, really began to expand and spread all over
Los Angeles. Theatre and concerts and filmmaking, in terms of the
grassroots, and comedy -- I think he was the -- Warren was the first
person to feature Father Guido Sarducci -- do you remember him as the
Catholic comedian?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
ARKIN
- He was a comedian that made fun of the Catholic church in a very
provocative way. So remember that, because I'll come back to it a
minute. So the Festival became very, very successful, and it started
happening every single year for three weeks straight, every weekend,
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and it was one of those places where you
go and feel really comfortable talking to strangers. And so it was a
place where community happened, and of course there were so many of us
volunteers working with Warren and learning so much from him. And many
of whom went on to become Hollywood directors and producers and famous
performers and so forth, and I can't even mention all the names that got
their start at the Garden Theatre Festival with Warren.But there were people that were offended by some of the provocative art
that was being shown, for example, Father Sarducci of the Catholic
Church. And so there were people that were out to get him really, really
badly, and Warren was working very closely with many city agencies and
the mayor's office directly, but he was busted, because people were out
to get him so badly. And he would never, ever do anything -- I knew him
very well by that time, and I knew that his heart was so passionate for
this work, but when you're producing something on that scale, very often
you use -- you have to be a bit creative about your bookkeeping. So when
it came time for audits, which the enemies --
-
COLLINGS
- Demanded, yeah.
-
ARKIN
- -- figured out how to do, there were little things that he could be
caught on, with the creative accounting use of the federal monies. I
don't know any of the details of that; I just know whatever Warren did,
he did nothing that was not in the public interest. And because that was
who he was.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, was it just the Father Sarducci stuff, or were there other things?
-
ARKIN
- Oh, I'm sure -- yeah, I'm sure there were probably other offensive things
to the people who were out to get Warren. But -- so he essentially -- I
headed up his support committee at one time, and we raised quite a bit
of money for his legal defense, and I think that he didn't actually go
to jail -- maybe he did, but for very briefly, and then was on probation
for awhile. But a remarkable, remarkable human being that was -- that
made enormous contributions to this city, in terms of the arts, and is
still -- I'm not sure what Warren is doing now. Oh, he is an arts
consultant; he works with young people, he lives in Mount Washington
with his wife, who is an architect, and very, very
environmentally-oriented.And there are still people, I think, from time to time, that get together
from the Garden Theatre Festival days, but many of us became such tight
friends, and had -- well, also, I would just say this, that the Garden
Theatre Festival was also -- grew from his yard in USC to Barnsdall
Park, and then when it stopped there, it was picked up by the downtown
festival, the annual huge thing they have that's now like ten blocks in
downtown every year. What do they call it? I forgot what it is. But it
was essentially the growth of the Garden Theatre Festival into this
larger Los Angeles festival. And so -- but he was the first, I think,
perhaps in the US, I'm not positive, to essentially have urban festivals
with many different stages, many different kinds of things happening.
And I know that he influenced many, many other people throughout the
spectrum. And he was definitely one of my most important mentors.
-
COLLINGS
- In the sense of his -- the way that he brought his vision and his
organizational skills together to realize this complex event.
-
ARKIN
- Yes. Learning how to produce a festival, taking it one step further than
the concerts that I had produced at the Songwriters' organization, and
being able to produce things that had many, many more parts to it. So I
could go on to produce and/or help other people produce all manner of
things, because I have the confidence in being able to do that, and
seeing the larger picture, and also seeing all the different kinds of
committees that you have to have, and how they can work together.
-
COLLINGS
- But your goal at this time was not to go forward in like arts
administration; it was always --
-
ARKIN
- No, by that time, I -- well, I would say by the late, late '70s, I was
already committed to doing something in the cooperative world; I didn't
know exactly what it was going to be. But after that retreat, I knew
that I was free to pursue that.
-
COLLINGS
- But it wasn't particularly an environmental focus at that time.
-
ARKIN
- No. It wasn't. I think that there were a lot of things in me that were
environmental, but not that consciousness that I later developed.
-
COLLINGS
- At that time which we're talking about, like 1980.
-
ARKIN
- Yes. Even 1980, which was the year that this organization was founded,
but it was founded as the Cooperative Resource Center. And then -- we
can talk a little bit about how the transition was to becoming an
environmental organization.
-
COLLINGS
- And do you have a mission, a founding mission statement for the
organization, from 1980?
-
ARKIN
- Well, I suppose I could dig one up. (laughter) It's kind of changed. But
I think at that time, it was to essentially be an education and training
center for cooperatives of all kinds. And that did transform into a much
narrower mission statement, eventually, to be an education, training,
and development center for small ecological cooperative communities.
-
COLLINGS
- OK. So we'll have to talk about how it got from mission statement A to
mission statement B.
-
ARKIN
- Yes. That would be interesting. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. Yeah. OK, great.
END OF Arkin.Lois.3B.03.27.2007.mp3
1.5. Session 4 ( May 4, 2007)
-
- UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 4, 5-04-2007
Arkin.Lois.4.05.04.2007.mp3
-
COLLINGS
- Ah, I cannot even believe it. OK, Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin,
May 4, 2007, in her office/home. OK, and --
-
ARKIN
- So we are still in 19- -- oh, no, we're actually in the late '80s, after
Rodney King, 19- --
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you're just wrapping up with the Songwriter's Resources, and you
want to found -- you've decided that cooperatives are where your
interests lie.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. Oh, so we hadn't been talking more beyond that point.
-
COLLINGS
- No, no.
-
ARKIN
- Got it. OK. So here we are, and my friend and lover who went off the Hong
Kong and became famous and lived, married, and had children. We have
remained friends over the years and still stay in touch. But it was
letting go of that relationship. And I think that I had spoken about my
mentor at the Songwriter's organization dying.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes. Helen. Helen King, I believe.
-
ARKIN
- And then shortly later, the man that I was involved with that was working
there also died, we did talk about that.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, yeah.
-
ARKIN
- OK. Great. And so that was -- and then that was -- and I remained on the
board of that organization; did I then speak about a retreat that the
organization had?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes.
-
ARKIN
- OK, good. So then we're through with that. So, and I had been very
inspired by Helen King, who really was my very important mentor, and a
few others. And I decided that I wanted to devote a part of my life to
cooperatives. And I didn't know how or what, and I didn't know that much
about cooperatives. All I knew and was inspired by is that this sounded
like a form of business that really incorporated social criteria and
business criteria, and I didn't know yet how important the environmental
criteria was for me. So I decided to, when I left working with the
Songwriter's [Resources and Services] organization, I decided to travel
around the country attending all the conferences that had anything to do
with cooperatives -- this was before Google. (laughter)So it's interesting, I don't even remember how I found them, but I did.
There was the National Cooperative Business Association, and the North
American Students of Cooperation -- I'm not sure that it was even called
the National Cooperative Business Association, it still might have been
called the Cooperative League of the USA, CLUSA. And I also had the
honor of meeting the honorable Jerry Voorhis, who had been a Congressman
for many years. He was the Congressman that Richard [M.] Nixon first
defeated, and I might have mentioned (inaudible), but I did. And so I
had started to visit Jerry also, because he had also been among the
founders of the Cooperative League of the USA, and he had just a long
and extraordinary history with cooperatives of all kinds and all over
the world, and particularly housing co-ops. And my passion was for
housing, and that -- and cooperative housing at that, which I was just
really learning about -- and my passion had to do also with breaking the
back of real estate speculation in Los Angeles. And I have friends where
I used to live, a few miles from where we are now, and I used to tell
them that all the time. Someday, I'm going to break the back of real
estate. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- How's it going? (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- It's very funny, because I'm still friends with a few of those folks that
I lived with on that block, and they're saying -- they think I'm nuts.
Well, anyway, we won't go there. So I traveled around meeting people in
the co-op movement, as well as spending time with Jerry. And Jerry was
not well, and ultimately, the summer before he died, a few years later,
he donated much of his library to us. And it was just such an honor to
receive those wonderful books on cooperatives, which we still have. And
meeting people all over the country that were leaders in the cooperative
movement, and I think there was California Cooperative Association, and
there was National Food Co-op Association and so forth. And I started
getting all of these publications and meeting these people, and I didn't
really know what I wanted to do with cooperatives; I just knew I wanted
to do something.And then of course, after traveling around and meeting people, and
especially doing a pretty extensive outreach -- what I thought, at that
time, was a pretty extensive outreach in Los Angeles, and finding that
there was really no one that had any expertise of the kind that I was
looking for and wanted to somehow provide to others but didn't quite
know how, so I just decided to start the Cooperative Resources and
Services, of course with the influence of Songwriter's Resources and
Services, and all the things that we did for songwriters in the
organization, why can't we do for people that want to have cooperatives,
live in cooperatives, make food co-ops, child care co-ops, so I started
kind of going around to various workshops here in Los Angeles, and
spouting off at the mouth about cooperative housing mostly at that time.
One Gary Squier, who at that time, in the late '70s, early '80s, was --
well, late '70s, because by the '80s, I had already started -- was
attending a lot of these workshops and conferences locally around
housing issues, and he had just come out of graduate school, UCLA
graduate school of Architecture and Urban Planning, and was working at
the Los Angeles Community Design Center. And we kept bumping into each
other, and he says, "Lois, why don't you come and do your cooperative
thing with the Design Center, and we can get you a VISTA grant."And so that's what happened; I went to the Design Center, which at that
time was already maybe a ten-year-old organization, and started by Jim
Bonner, an architect, and activist-architect in this city, who was at
that time the executive director. And so they umbrella'd me in, and I
was able to begin things. So the things that we kind of started out with
were that we were a resource center for cooperatives of all kinds, and
we started by having public forums, and we had Jerry Voorhis come and
give us the speech and promoted it, and there were a few other little
things.But then the big thing that I decided would really launch this
organization was to have a big co-ops fair. And so we planned this
co-ops fair, and I put together a committee of about six people that
were working in various aspects, either volunteering or working in
various aspects of cooperatives here in Los Angeles; we put this kind of
fair planning committee together. And there was at that time --
(inaudible) my memory -- there was this wonderful, wonderful person who
was visiting from England, who was a very strong activist in the United
Kingdom. And he was visiting in LA just at the time that we were
starting to plan the fair, and he said, "Oh, I'll help you plan the
fair," and so I invited him to come and share space in my live/work
home, and to have a place to stay. And he really helped lead the
development of the fair planning committee, so it was very exciting, a
very exciting committee, and very dedicated and committed, And that -- I
believe it was the following April, 1981, that we did have the fair, and
it was in Exposition, it was -- not Exposition Park, but it was at the
Museum of Science and Industry, on the west side of the museum building,
which was a very big open space between the museum and the Coliseum at
that time; I'm sure it's built up now.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, it's the Science Center now.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, and it was just this wonderful, wonderful space. And Kelly Lang
[Channel 4], I don't know if you remember her, she used to have this
Sunday show on the old NBC channel four --
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, right. Yes.
-
ARKIN
- And so she broadcast from the co-op fair that day, and Beverly Beyette
from the LA [Los Angeles] Times came and did a feature story on the fair
for the family section, I think it was at that time of the LA [Los
Angeles] Times. And we had about 40 different co-ops with booths that
somehow I found (inaudible), and they were little tiny -- little small
buying clubs; they were tiny little worker co-ops; they were the food
co-ops; we had of course Co-Opportunity at that time; we had the Venice
Food Co-op, which is -- only just a few years ago finally went down. But
it wasn't limited to that; we had Sunkist Oranges, which is a co-op,
it's a producer co-op. And we had a stage that went all day, and Chic
Streetman and Mississippi, two fabulous performers that were people I'd
met through the Songwriter's organization, hosted the performances all
day long, so there was a stage going. And all these booths, children's
activities and so forth, so it was one of those things that my friend
from England said this was the orgasmic labor, and he wrote an article
about it, having a project like that where everyone planned and planned
and planned, and then was very excited, and then pulled it off and was
very happy; it was kind of like sex. So it was very cute; I still have
this article.And it was just a remarkable event. It's interesting, though, because I
was so anxious that everyone there connect with one another, and have a
good old time, and I'm such -- at that time, and I suppose I still am --
idealistic about egalitarianism and democracy. I was certainly a case of
the shoemaker's son going barefoot, because there really wasn't anyone
working the CRSP booth, and there wasn't anyplace, anyone anywhere, that
was -- oh, you know, this is the organization behind this kind of thing.
So it was just kind of this --
-
COLLINGS
- It just sort of happened by itself.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, it was just kind of like it happened by itself. And I think that I
did a good deal of that for the whole history of our organization, I
would say, for the first 20 years or so. So I think it's only been in
the past few years that I felt strongly that we should really -- (phone
ringing) oh, I'm sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- That's OK.
-
ARKIN
- -- we should really -- oh, it's already unplugged. It'll just ring, but I
won't answer it. But I felt strongly that we should establish credit for
the organization, because it really does help leverage other kinds of
resources when you do have a track record, and when people know about
that track record. And so it's really not me personally; it's about what
a good public interest purpose is that you manifest by doing that. And
so that was a long lesson, essentially, for me to learn. Initially, this
organization, we had a business plan for how we were going to develop as
an organization with an organizational chart and financial projections,
and how the staff was going to grow, and what the sources of funding
were going to be and so forth.But it was the early 1980s, and the Reagan Administration had just come
into being. And the non-profit world was, for the most part, on [David]
Stockman's hit list. So lots of programs were dismantled; remember, that
was the era when so much of our social welfare system was dismantled,
and when we started to see people on the street that were being released
from institutions and had nowhere to go and so forth. And so my thinking
was that I found it very hard to think about trying to do any
conventional fundraising in that kind of atmosphere, in terms of what I
saw the needs were. How could this little education and training center,
which no one was particularly interested in anyway -- co-ops are not
very sexy (laughter), I think I eventually realized, in the mainstream
of society. And how could we compete, or how would we want to compete,
with those kinds of needs for funding?And so essentially, we never developed any kind of a conventional
fundraising campaign, and eventually, after a few years, as I got more
and more into issues of sustainability and the environment and ecology,
I realized that the fundraising program that we had initially planned
for the organizational development scheme was completely unsustainable,
and the fact that we had nothing -- I was at that time, and throughout
pretty much the history of our -- 27-year history of this organization,
have been a full-time volunteer, I have never -- I didn't receive a
salary, when we had the VISTA grant, I think I got like $250 a month,
and eventually, there were times when I got a little bit more, but I
always called it a stipend, rather than a -- you know, I was not
employed by the organization, because I was also a war tax resister. And
my way of resisting the war tax was simply not to make enough money to
file. And I felt that was the most legitimate and least threatening way
to live, and I had learned how to live a fairly high quality life on a
very low income already; I had done that in Spain, and through those
years of my drop-out period. But my savings had definitely run out, and
I needed to have some money to live on, so that was kind of how I
resolved that issue. But going back to the business side --
-
COLLINGS
- Do you remain a war tax resister today?
-
ARKIN
- Kind of. (laughter) There was some other issues that have come up in the
past few years where I found myself paying very small amount of taxes.
-
COLLINGS
- But still, that's pretty good.
-
ARKIN
- And I have actually -- you know, there have been conversations about
this, and you pick and choose your battles at different times of your
life.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, of course, yeah.
-
ARKIN
- But at any rate, the -- let me see.
-
COLLINGS
- So you were starting this cooperative, and your idea at that time was to
--
-
ARKIN
- Of the organization, was to --
-
COLLINGS
- -- was to be a clearinghouse of information.
-
ARKIN
- Correct. That's right. And so, yeah, Cooperative Resources and Services
was the name of the organization, until we realized, in filing our
corporate papers, that we couldn't use the word "cooperative" in our
name, because we weren't in fact organized as a cooperative; we were
organized as a non-profit corporation. And so we essentially changed our
name to CRSP, C-R-S-P, all caps, no periods, no spaces. (laughter) And
that went through, and even with the little handwritten "P" on the
articles of incorporation, because it was down there at the Secretary of
State's office when all this happened. It was much easier in those days
than it is today. And so as I think I started to say, we were a resource
center for all kinds of cooperatives, and we were launched at the fair
and we continued to do things like -- little dialogue, drop-in dialogue
groups, having little house concerts in my live/work space across the
street, which we'll -
-
COLLINGS
- And that was just an apartment that you were renting at that time.
-
ARKIN
- Yes. And it's directly across the street on Bimini and White House Place.
It was interesting because how I got to move on this street, there was a
woman that lived on White House Place at that time that worked for the
National Endowment for the Arts, and I had met her when I was working at
the Songwriters Association. And when my landlord in Lemon Grove -- my
new landlord decided to evict me, because I was in a rent-controlled
unit and she wanted to raise the rent, which I think I mentioned.
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
ARKIN
- Or maybe -- so I had lived in that place on Lemon Grove for about 12
years, and the new landlord -- that was shortly after the 1978 rent
control law came into effect here in Los Angeles, and so she wanted to
evict me, and I was in this place, "I don't want to have any negative
energy in my life," and so I didn't fight it, and I just went homeless
for about six months. In those days -- well, it wasn't really homeless,
because I just crashed at different friends' houses, and I house-sat and
so forth, until I finally found this place on White House Place to -- at
the suggestion of the woman who lived up on the end of the block and
worked for the National Endowment for the Arts, and it was owned by the
Los Angeles Unified School District, this old four-plex. And there were
three four-plexes on White House Place, and they were planning to build
a little school there, but I convinced the person in charge of real
estate at that time to let me move in on a temporary basis, and that I
would certainly know that it was going to be temporary, and I wouldn't
be any problem. And I remember taking him out to lunch two or three
times and making friends, and really convincing him that I would be a
really wonderful tenant.So finally, I did get to move in, because the problem with relocating
was, I was -- at that time, rents were escalating, and I was going to
not be able to find -- and I wanted to have a place that I could
actually have a live/work space. So I was going to have to settle for a
space half as large as the one I was living in for twice as much money,
and this was not acceptable to me on my budget, before I actually found
the office that I was going to work in downtown with the Design Center.
So I did finally move into White House Place, and after a few years at
the Design Center, I did finally move my office home. And they needed
the place to expand, and we weren't particularly going in the same
direction by that time.And so I had all these meetings there, and so I had a real presence in
the neighborhood, and it was only a few years into having this
organization that I realized that what we needed to have is a
neighborhood -- we needed to have a demonstration neighborhood that
essentially manifested all the values we were now talking about, because
we were talking about limited equity, housing co-ops; I was very
enamored with the idea of mutual housing associations, as they have in
Europe, in which they built up much of Northern Europe and Western
Europe after World War II, via these mutual housing associations, where
people would save on a large national scale, and so there'd be this kind
of national bank for building housing, and people waited their turn to
move into their housing, and it was cooperatively organized, and it was
really a quite remarkable project.And so I wanted us to have a Mutual Housing Association, and started
publishing fliers and documents and having forums on mutual housing. I
think we had an attorney's forum on limited equity co-ops so we could
teach local attorneys what that was and how it worked. We -- and then of
course there were the food co-ops, and the shared houses; I thought, oh,
there's so many shared houses in this city, but they're not networked,
and so we wanted to network them, and so we had the Shared Housing
Network. And then by 1985, of course, the co-housing movement was just
getting started by these two young architects who had returned from
research in Denmark, where the co-housing movement had originally
started, and they were writing this book; it wasn't yet published, but
even before the book was published, we started hosting them for talks in
Los Angeles, because I thought we should have a co-housing movement.And it was, interestingly, during one of those talks, that a reporter for
the Los Angeles Times, whom we had made friends with. I think it was the
same one -- Beverly Beyette, who did the co-ops fair, did a front-page
article in the family section on co-housing, this new idea for
mainstreaming kind of intentional cooperative living. And that article
was picked up by Associated Press, and it then spread all over the
country. So actually, the cohousing movement actually started right
here. So we did all these different kinds of things, and it had to do
with every aspect of cooperatives. We published a newsletter called
"Co-op News and Shared Housing Networker," something like that. We had
all kinds of articles and ads.
-
COLLINGS
- So you said that you felt that it was important to get the word out about
what you were doing to the immediate neighborhood; is that right?
-
ARKIN
- OK, but that was -- no, that came -- that actually came much later. So
essentially, what happened in about '84 or '85, is we began to think
about how are we -- what we need to do is have a demonstration
neighborhood where someone could actually walk down the block and have
this "ah-ha" experience, because of how everything was organized, in
terms of sustainability, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of the way
people were interacting with one another, and the eco technologies that
were visible, and the connections that people felt and might not
understand. Seeing how everything was connected. So that's when we
decided to do a Los Angeles Eco-Village, and we began looking for
property at that time, and we were able to find an 11-acre site about
seven miles from here. That was an old landfill site owned by the
Department of Water and Power -- did we talk about this already?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
ARKIN
- OK. And we were able to -- that 11-acre landfill was scheduled to go to
public auction as surplus property, and we had by that time also had an
architect that was working with us who was a volunteer architect, and he
made us look very professional, with a 50-page feasibility study and
three-dimensional models and sketches and everything. And so we began
going downtown and knocking on doors, and letting the city know that we
wanted to partner with you. And the city doesn't essentially know how to
partner with anyone unless they're asking for money, so that was kind of
interesting.But we did find a wonderful, compassionate, enthusiastic executive in
City Hall in the person of Calvin Hamilton, who was the planning
director at that time. And he loved what we were doing, and I think he
lived vicariously through what we were doing, because his hands were
somewhat politically tied to do anything, as most planning directors in
LA have been over the years, hopefully not the current one. But so he
started talking to all the other directors in City Hall, and setting up
meetings for us to come give presentations. And it was really quite
amazing, and we continued to advocate with lots of people downtown. And
eventually, that public advocacy resulted in us actually winning, or
being awarded, an American Planning Association award for advocacy
planning.And it's funny, because I didn't even know what that was, but there I am,
standing up getting this award about something I didn't know, it didn't
feel like there was anything unusual about it to me; you want to let
people know what we're doing and what's needed in the city. And so it
resulted ultimately in having the idea of the eco-village written into
the city's housing element, which is part of the city's general plan,
and that gave us some real credibility that we really hadn't had before.But meantime, so we continued to hold meetings for this like 20-member
planning committee that we had for the eco-village -- we didn't have the
word "eco-village" then, but at any rate, then it was years later, it
was 1992, and our city went up in flames. And our planning committee
began to reconsider the question of, what should our priorities be, in
inner city Los Angeles? Should we be building this sexy new solar
ecological urban village with mutual housing, limited equity co-ops,
ecological technologies, local exchange trading systems and so forth;
people didn't know what we were talking about anyway, because we didn't
have that word yet for eco-village. And -- or should we be thinking
about retrofitting an existing neighborhood that was affected by the
fires, and retrofitting where there was already all the infrastructure.
And so that was a no-brainer for our committee, and we really
enthusiastically started to make this the retrofitted --
-
COLLINGS
- And were your committee members at that time already living in this
neighborhood? No?
-
ARKIN
- No one lived in this neighborhood. They were people that were
constituents of our organization, and came over for meetings. There were
a few volunteers even before we made that decision who were coming over
and starting to garden in the front yard of the four-plex across the
street. One of them was Esfandiar Abbassi who lives here today. And once
we made that decision, in 1992, in December of 1992, to make the
eco-village here, January 1, we hit the streets -- we being me, the only
person who lived here --
-
COLLINGS
- This was January 1, after the --
-
ARKIN
- Yes, the uprisings (inaudible) --
-
COLLINGS
- Uprisings.
-
ARKIN
- And it took us an eight-month dialogue to come to that decision. And we
hit the streets, walking up and down the streets in this neighborhood,
which I had never really been committed to, because I was kind of always
on my way someplace else. And so now that was my commitment, and I
opened my door -- it was a very scary neighborhood; it had been fairly
deeply affected by the uprisings, there were fires immediately
back-to-back with the building that we're in right now.
-
COLLINGS
- That shopping center behind us, did that --
-
ARKIN
- (inaudible) Shopping Center --
-
COLLINGS
- That burned, as I recall.
-
ARKIN
- That's right. And there were fires in the middle of that strip mall;
there were fires on the front porch of where I lived at that time. And
within two blocks, there were like five fires, and so there was a lot of
gang activity here; there was a lot of drug activity, prostitution.
People were fighting one another; there was a lot of racism, people of
one ethnic group didn't like their children playing with kids of another
ethnic group. Kids were never allowed on the street by themselves. So it
was not a healthy neighborhood.So we held our first meeting of the neighborhood shortly after, in the
spring of '93, and invited neighbors. Not very many came, but those that
came were asked: what are the strengths and weaknesses of our
neighborhood? And we never got beyond the first one, which of course was
crime, and people just wanted to talk about that. And what we knew was
the fear of crime was symptomatic of the breakdown of community, and
that the fear of crime was much more debilitating than crime itself. And
what we wanted to do is work on community; that's what we all wanted for
ourselves, for our organization, for the city. And so we just decided to
work on community, and we did that in a variety of ways that were very
organic, and not with very much thought, all that much thought.
Volunteers would come in several times a week, and we'd walk up and down
the street meeting neighbors, anyone that was on the block that looked
familiar, introduce ourself --
-
COLLINGS
- Was there any sort of language barrier that you came across in the course
of these --
-
ARKIN
- Many people spoke only Spanish, and many people spoke only Korean. And
so, with the Spanish, sometimes we had people that did speak Spanish,
and I think early on, I made friends with one of our neighbors that had
lived on the block at that time about 25 years, I think, who was
bilingual, and so we included her, and sometimes I would walk up and
down the street with her. And so if someone answered the door when we
were going door to door distributing newsletters and things like that.
But also, you know, I speak enough Spanish to be friendly with people.
And so it wasn't ever -- I didn't ever consider it a serious barrier.
But we would walk up and down, we would meet people, we would learn as
much as we could about them, and then we would do something that I call
"positive gossip." We would meet other -- we would sponsor community
events, and flier the whole neighborhood and invite people to come and
share their food, and try to have some activities and entertainment.And then, when we would meet people, we would introduce them to one
another very enthusiastically. "Oh, this is the person I was telling you
about!" We wanted them to want to meet one another. And I also, one
other thing I did was I opened my front door, decided that I would not
be afraid, and I opened my front door during -- all day and all evening,
sometimes I even went to bed and forgot to close it. And it was unlocked
or open, so I invited anyone in the neighborhood anytime to come, stop
by and talk, if you need any help or resources on anything, I was there,
because I really was a resourceful person. And so the neighbors did
start to drop in, and also, I was on the street every single day. And I
eventually, within the next two to three years, knew just about every
single person in the two-block area. Maybe not by name, but I knew which
building they lived in, and I knew their faces, and they knew mine.
-
COLLINGS
- Did their tend to be any internal cohesion to the neighborhood, like
perhaps extended family members had told each other about vacant
apartments, or perhaps people from the same village had ended up living
on this street -- was there any of that?
-
ARKIN
- So the big thing was, as is typical of Los Angeles, there was frequently
community within a single building, but never building to building. And
so -- and not necessarily in all the buildings. There are -- and that
there certainly is a great deal of that in this neighborhood, as well as
neighborhoods all over LA, particularly with various ethnic groups,
although I don't know that it's limited. But I see that -- it could be
quite a long conversation, but a lot of people hit themselves on the
head, and particularly people from white, middle-class backgrounds whose
organizations aren't particularly well-integrated ethnically or
racially. And they beat up on themselves all the time, because, "Oh,
here we are, one more annual meeting and we're still all white. We
decided last year we were going to integrate." Now, this does not
happen, I don't think, so much anymore as it used to, because I think
there's been tremendous effort to integrate a lot of -- particularly
environmental and environmental justice organizations, and all kinds of
social justice organizations.But at that time, people were particularly still beating up on
themselves, and my -- and also particularly within the intentional
communities movement, which was our intent, to become an intentional
community, composed of both our preexisting neighbors and new neighbors
that would move here intentionally. And what -- and exactly the point
that you're making, I think, is the point that I would try to make to a
lot of people, is that oftentimes, low-income people of color are
already an intentional community within their apartment buildings
because of just that thing. There is -- whenever there's a vacancy, they
would get a family member or a friend to move in, and then they would
essentially have someone to watch their kids when they went to the
market, or to trade off all kinds of things. I had also noticed,
particularly when I was working with at-risk youth and their families in
East Los Angeles and in South Los Angeles, so many, many years ago,
before I started this organization. I also remember how many of the
people I worked with treated money and things. They treated them, what's
mine is yours, what's yours is mine; it was really, really amazing. And
so there was so much sharing in ways that you don't particularly find
among people from white middle-class backgrounds. And so, but it is
people from white middle-class backgrounds more, I think -- in some
respects, and this could be a very long sociological conversation, but
systematically, the breakdown of community got started in the '20s with
the advertising industry, and there was actually, I think, a conspiracy
to break down community, because that enabled the corporate sector to
sell more stuff --
-
COLLINGS
- Right, you need more insurance when you have fewer community members to
rely on.
-
ARKIN
- Right, you need (inaudible), that's right, you need more vacuum cleaners
and you need more lawnmowers and you need more washing machines and so
forth. So it's very interesting, and then if you were really poor, you
were already sharing, and you already had a community. And I think that
oftentimes the very poor people, either the poor people and the people
of color that would move into middle-class areas that no longer were
doing that kind of sharing, and then became -- their lives became as
problematic as the rest of the middle-class. And so it was very
interesting, and so I did see that with this neighborhood, and I did
see, when we would have our community events on the street, and we would
invite all of our neighbors to bring food to share, it was so
interesting because we'd just, you know, "Just bring a small dish, not
anything big," but most of our ethnic neighbors, of Korean backgrounds
and Latino backgrounds, would bring these big plates of things and not
just a little bit.
-
COLLINGS
- Yum. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- And where even today that happens when we sometimes invite people to
dinner, they bring these humongous plates rather than just -- if
everyone brings enough for four or five, there'd be enough for all of
us. Everyone won't necessarily get something of everything, but -- so it
was very interesting. So the big thing that we did initially was work
with children. The parents were very protective of their children; we
did things like get out in the street and play ball, and parents would
open the window, "Oh, they're playing ball, so they must be OK." And so
they'd let their kids come out to play ball, and eventually we went
around and talked to the parents and we said we wanted to have a -- we
wanted to invite your kid to come to a brunch on the sidewalk to taste
some fruits, because we're going to plant some fruit trees. And so we
had brunch on the sidewalk with about a dozen, maybe eight or nine kids,
ages --
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's a lovely idea.
-
ARKIN
- -- four to nine, say. And we had them taste all these different kinds of
fruit, and then have them select the kind of fruit tree they would like
to plant. And then a few weeks later, we'd have them draw a picture of
their tree, and we had them name their tree, and we had them put a stake
in the ground and pin their picture to the stake so we knew where the
tree was going to come up.
-
COLLINGS
- This is really hearkening back to your earlier work with youth, it would
seem, in the neighborhoods.
-
ARKIN
- Well, no, this was the work that we did with the kids; this was in '93,
'94 --
-
COLLINGS
- No, no, I mean with the probation department.
-
ARKIN
- Oh, with the probation kids. Oh, I suppose, but very, very different,
because those kids were definitely teenagers, and we didn't ever do
anything like that. We did take them --
-
COLLINGS
- You did talk about the hairdressing --
-
ARKIN
- We talked about -- yeah, different kinds of things. But yeah, I suppose
it was -- I did love working with kids, and I did love working with
youth, but this time, it was a very, very different kind of thing, and
we knew that it was a wonderful way to start this project, and there
were people here that were just wonderful, particularly Esfandiar
Abbassi, and at that time Mary Maverick, who were very involved in the
beginnings. Ian Mclvaine, who is still our board president, and
eventually at that time did live in the neighborhood for a few years.
And so we have this brunch; kids picked out their trees, you know. We
had them plant the trees, after planting the trees, we all got in a
circle, maybe 25 of us, at that first Earth Day tree planting in April
1993, and got in a circle, we asked the kids to talk about what they
thought the problems of the trees were going to be, and how they thought
they could help the trees, and what the trees were going to give us. And
in that way, we had this kind of community dialogue of both the adults
and the children, and it was a combination of adults, parents who lived
in the community and the others that lived in the community, as well as
the volunteers that were coming in at that time.And so but the thing that I always emphasize is that this process,
working with the children socially, and the selection process for the
fruit and then doing the ecological event of planting a tree, and
ultimate economic event of being able to harvest the fruits so that
their parents didn't have to go to the market to buy fruit. That showed
so organically the integration of the social and the ecological and the
economic systems of the neighborhood, and how that was just naturally
happening. We didn't stop and think, "Well, let's see. How can we make
this (inaudible) first? Oh, let's see, how can we make this --?"But it was that kind of almost spontaneous organic development of the
tree steward activities, tree planting, child's tree stewarding program
that we felt that we should be able to get our heads wrapped around
everything that we do in the neighborhood. We might primarily start
something as a social event, but eventually, we needed to look at how it
was affecting us economically and ecologically. We might start something
that was an ecological event, but eventually have to look at the social
and economic end, and so we were always thinking holistically,
understanding that an eco-village is a complex set of interactive
processes that effectively integrate the social, the economic, and the
ecological, and then also, the other things that we thought about within
a few years after starting, were, "Gee, how did we start? What were the
main elements?"And I believe that again it was a very organic process, but I think there
was a lot of questioning and thoughts about what are the problems in our
life support systems, in our bio region, with air, soil, and water? What
are the issues in our political jurisdiction? Who are we in relationship
to each other, and in relationship to the land where we are? And what
can we do about all that, in terms of what resources we have? And so
there were early decisions made, like -- and information that we had,
studies at that time in the early '90s had just come out about children
-- oh, no, this was -- yeah, that was in the early '90s -- the NRDC,
Natural Resources Defense Council, had one study, but even before their
study, the Labor Strategy Center had put out a study on air pollution
and children, and we discovered that children in this area, and areas
east and southeast of here, had 20% less lung capacity than children,
say, in Santa Monica or the West Valley.And so, gee, it was a no-brainer: let's stop driving now. Let's stop
driving? That's -- oh, just one or two or three or four people? What's
that going to do? Well, the answer to a sense of hopeless; the answer to
that is action, activity, activism. Do something; you'll feel better
right away if you do something. So stop your driving -- and they were
all very, very busy people. So, oh, gee, we could go out in the world as
very, very busy people without cars, and without trying to hitchhike
rides with our friends all the time. As a matter of fact, we often
found, and still do, that people are constantly trying to give us rides
someplace. And unless it's 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, it's kind of
like, well, what would be the point of not driving if I'm always
accepting rides from people? (laughter)But -- and then also that we were able to -- people were able to know we
were very busy people who could live a very active life here in the city
without owning a private automobile. And this was before the metro,
before the rapids, before the subway, but we were still, and I used to
say and I still do, we're still -- and this neighborhood is the most
transit-rich neighborhood outside of downtown. We're within walking
distance of 20 bus lines, and of course, now, two subway stops. And so
it was not that hard. And we were all bicyclists, and so we started
getting around by foot and bicycle and transit. And it wasn't that
difficult at all, and it was -- I had three cars in the -- I had three
cars, because people kept donating them to us, because I kept saying I'm
going to start a car co-op, and they kept getting all these tickets
because I didn't change the parking side for street cleaning -- that was
also an incentive for getting rid of the cars. (laughter)But I have to say that for many years, on and off, I had given up my car,
given up driving, and as long as I was "giving up" something, it was
like smoking, giving up smoking, which I was a longtime smoker. Not now
for 25 years, but -- you do a little twist in your head between the
giving up and the getting rid of. As long as you're giving up, you're
sacrificing. But when you're getting rid of, you're freeing yourself.
And this is something that I think is really, really important for the
way, the changes that all of us are making or are going to have to make,
around global climate change issues. And so it was a wonderful freeing
to finally get rid of my car, and to go about the city that way, and it
still is; you smell things that you never smelled before, you see things
that you never saw before, you interact in ways that you never
interacted before, and I still contend to this day that the advancement
of car culture in our society is at the root of the breakdown of
community, because as long as we're locking ourselves up in these tin
boxes, of course, we're segregating ourselves from people, and then that
also helps us to develop fear of the other. Whereas when you're butt to
butt with someone on the bus or on the corner, and people are smiling,
and no matter how different they are, for the most part, if you have a
smile on your face, people smile back at you, and it's a whole different
world out there. So, at any rate, back to some of --
-
COLLINGS
- Well, let me just take you back to the activities you were doing with the
kids in the neighborhood. Do any of those kids still live here? I mean,
you're talking about 1993, and now we're in 2007.
-
ARKIN
- Well, I have to say that this neighborhood in one respect is really not
different than other neighborhoods, and that is, on average, the
American household moves about once every five years. So I would say
that we have lost just about every single one of those initial
eco-village kids, but they were so special. And the bonding was so
tight; I was closer to those kids than I am to my nieces and nephews, I
should say, and some of them still do call occasionally, and still do
drop by occasionally. And it is so heartwarming, and it is really like
family, because the bonding was so close; we took those kids on field
trips -- you know, it was very interesting, one kind of field trip that
we used to take the kids on -- bicycle trips, once we really got
neighborly with our neighbors, and we would take bike trips sometimes
through Hancock Park, and the kids would, because they had learned quite
a bit from us, some of them, and they would say, "Gee, I wonder how many
people live in that big house." And I would, "Oh, certainly two, maybe
three or four," and their reaction would be, "Don't you think they get
lonely?" Other times, I remember other kids saying, "Oh, look at that
lawn," one of those great big, you know, at Hancock Park. "I don't see
any weeds on that lawn. I bet those people are using pesticides or
herbicides." So it was really, really interesting, the little lessons
they picked up from working with us.
-
COLLINGS
- So would you have the sense that when people left this neighborhood that
they were moving to a quote-unquote "better" neighborhood, or they were
returning to their home countries, or what?
-
ARKIN
- I think that the immigrant community in this neighborhood is always and
forever aspiring to the American dream, and I think that is one of our
challenges in this neighborhood, it still is, not only with the people,
the immigrant community that lives in this neighborhood but with some of
our own eco-villagers, and to the extent that they use the neighborhood
to make it to the next step.
-
COLLINGS
- This is -- this neighborhood is sort of like a way-station.
-
ARKIN
- A way-station; it's a first stop after LAX or what have you. So our
challenge, because so many people who live here intentionally in
eco-village are people who have come from middle-class backgrounds, no
matter what their ethnic orientation is, although not all of them. And
so they have seen kind of and experienced the vacuousness of that kind
of life, and the consumerist culture, and essentially, are downwardly
mobile. And I use that in the most positive way, and the people, the
immigrant community is here and upwardly mobile, so our challenge is to
intercept that, to learn -- we are both a teaching and a learning -- I
mean, we have so much to learn from our neighbors, and they have so much
to learn from us. And how can we ultimately influence one another in
ways that they do not necessary go on to a conventional consumerist
lifestyle, even if they move out and up.Many people in this neighborhood were dramatically underhoused, and
although I am not a fan of necessarily the HUD standards for how many
people to a room you should have. When we bought this building in 1996,
I'll get to that, we had several families that lived in it, and also the
building that we had bought a few years later next door that lived in
it, that were like six people, parents and four growing boys from ages,
say, 11 to 17, in a 550-square-foot one-bedroom apartment. So I consider
that underhoused, and we had a similar family, I think, of six or
actually seven, slightly larger, next door. So we helped them to
relocate one family into another rental, non-profit rental place where
they had four bedrooms, which was maybe a little bit too much, from my
perspective, for that. But their rents continued to be totally
affordable; I think they even were paying less than they were paying
here for a place that was twice as large. And in another case, we
actually helped one of our -- and both of these were immigrant families.
And -- from El Salvador, in both cases, and the second family, we
actually helped buy a house.And as I said, they were extraordinarily underhoused, although we do have
policies in our buildings, not incredibly strictly enforced, where we
don't want to have more than two people in a single unit; that's about
400 square feet, and we don't have to have less than two people in a
one-bedroom unit. And we don't want to have less than three people in a
two-bedroom unit. So that's -- so it might be between three or four
people in a one-people, there might be five or six in a two-bedroom. So
anyway, those are the policies that we decided to have, in order to
manifest and to show that we can live at a lower income and in smaller
housing, and actually raise the quality of community life. And that is
really one of our primary public interest purposes; how do you have a
lower environmental impact, and yet raise the quality of community life.And of course, in the real estate that we own now, we have lots of common
spaces; we have a community room, and we have a lobby that functions as
a community space, and we have wonderful outdoor courtyard space and
front porch space and backyard, lower backyard space; we have many, many
spaces that people can extend their social life into these social
spaces. And even though many, many apartment buildings and condos in the
greater Los Angeles -- I mean, all over the country -- have all of this
additional social space; if people are not in the community, are not in
kind of a cohesive relationship with one another, those spaces are
extraordinarily under-utilized. And I think ours got fairly well
utilized, although you don't always see someone out someplace. But
there's plenty of space to be alone outdoors or be with people, and the
same indoors. So going back, I guess, to the kids, so working with the
kids in that way really was the initial eco-village start up activities,
and we had so much fun in those first two to three years, and so many
community events; we had a community newsletter, once I was going
door-to-door handing out the newsletter --
-
COLLINGS
- Do you have any copies of that, by any chance?
-
ARKIN
- I do, and I'll give you some.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, yeah. I'd love to see that.
-
ARKIN
- Actually -- yes, I will, I can do that. And the -- I have them all, from
1980 to -- I think the last one we published was 1994; I could probably
give you a whole set, if you want.
-
COLLINGS
- That would be wonderful.
-
ARKIN
- I think -- I'm not sure if I did, to the social research library or not,
but I'd love to have a set of those in the UCLA library. So -- oh, so
one time, I was going door to door and knocking on doors, "Have you been
getting the newsletter?" And one neighbor said, "Oh, yes, I've been
getting that, but I thought it was a joke. Who would do such wonderful
things in our neighborhood, in this neighborhood?" There wasn't a sense
of ownership in the neighborhood. And then we did things like -- oh,
there were a couple of women who lived across the street from each other
for 30 years, they were both Latina, by the way, and they never met each
other. And every day they went down the back side of their apartment
buildings into their cars, went out of the neighborhood and back, and
they never saw each other and they never met. And so that was fun for
them. So we would introduce people to one another that way, so there was
a lot of really fun things, being on the street in those days, knowing
all the neighbors, answering questions, referring them to resources. It
was working with the kids, taking them on field trips, even weekend
camping trips. All of that was a very, very exciting time for us and for
me.
-
COLLINGS
- And were the owners of these buildings ever aware of all these exciting
things that were going on?
-
ARKIN
- In the first year of eco-village, I made contact with all of the owners
and told them that whenever they were considering selling any of their
buildings, we wanted to buy them. Now, of course we didn't have any
money to speak of, but I knew that if we had a really good plan that we
would do that. Of course, I don't think any of them took us seriously,
because how would someone who lives in that neighborhood ever be able to
buy a building. But then of course, the 1990 -- of course there was the
uprising, which had crashed property values, and then a few years later,
there was the earthquake, and that further crashed the property values.
And people were leaving LA in droves; people that were staying were
either people who -- I mean, obviously a lot of people did stay, but a
lot of people left, and a lot of people stayed because they had no
choice; they would have preferred to leave, they had no choice.And other people, of course, were staying because they were deeply
committed to the city and loved the city, and I was one of those in the
latter category, as all the other eco-villagers were. And it was at
least two years, I would say, a year and a half or so, before the first
intentional eco-villager moved to the neighborhood, but after the
earthquake, as property values really did plummet, and the following
year -- that was '94, the following year, I noticed from my four-plex
across the street, I noticed a man with a clipboard and a suit and a
briefcase looking at this building, and that was my clue -- I better go
out and talk to him. And so it was that that was someone involved in the
real estate sale of this building, and let me know that it was on the
market. So that's all I needed to know. At first, we always knew that we
would have to buy real estate if we were going to keep things
financially sustainable; otherwise, eventually the neighborhood
gentrifies, and it wouldn't be available to go to lower-income people.And so -- but I always thought it would be one of the four-plexes that
would have gone first, and this happened to be the building, the 40-unit
building, the one that we learned was on the market. But going back to
the point, and I'll come back to this, we had contacted all the building
owners, told them that we were available if they wanted to sell their
buildings, and they laughed at us. And then we also got their permission
to plant fruit trees, and of course, they did give permission;
eventually, we realized they really didn't care one way or another,
because essentially, most of the landlord -- they were all at that time
mom and pop landlords, even for the 72-unit building down the block, all
absentee mom and pop landlords, with the exception of one who was a
normal occupant that we did make good friends with. And still do, and in
her four-plex, all the other three units are occupied by eco-villagers,
and she knows if she ever wants to sell it. And she's a very sympathetic
landlord; she has not crazily raised her rents like everyone else. So
going back to the --
-
COLLINGS
- You realized that this building, the 40-unit building was for sale --
-
ARKIN
- It was for sale, so we had to buy it. How were we going to do it? We had,
I'm happy to say at that time, $20,000 in savings. Savings -- this was
monies that had been donated to us that we knew -- you know, like any
family that's saving for a house or a new business or their children's
education, organizations have savings too, for a rainy day and/or a new
-- so we knew we were saving some money from those large donations that
had come to us, and so, "OK, how are we going to use that $20,000 to
leverage the $500,000," which I decided was the maximum that we were
going to pay for this 40-unit building, which was in terrible disrepair.
And the landlords were very, very nasty people, the owners were very,
very nasty people.But we had a marvelous real estate broker that was a longtime personal
friend who decided to work with us, and she said, "You let me work with
owners; you just go out and raise the money." And so our initial
approach to that was, well, we'll just do what other non-profit housing
developers do; we'll just get a jigsaw puzzle of money, a little public
money here, a little foundation money here, a little bank load money
here, and we'll jigsaw puzzle it all together and make it work. Well,
all of those funding sources had all kinds of conditions called
underwriting criteria, which is a good thing, and it was -- there were
several that really did want to loan to us, and we did put together a
30-page prospectus that talked about our vision and how we would pay the
money back.But in the meantime, what we decided to do is just keep growing our
community loan fund, because that would be kind of the ace in the hole,
if everyone else fell through, or we decided we didn't want to take this
money or that money. We didn't -- we got assistance from a major
non-profit's technical support organization, LISC, the Local Initiative
Support Corporation, they loaned us one of their wonderful people who
crunches numbers, and he worked side by side with the -- on several
occasions; I'm trying to think of his name -- a wonderful person, still
in the non-profit -- no, maybe he went to the profit world, but I'm not
sure -- but he kept encouraging us to borrow $1.5 million.But that's what it was going to take to rehab the building, and what I
knew -- I did know this much -- that means we have a very big debt
service, and there's a payment due every month that is much more than
the half -- there were only 23 units occupied in this 40-unit building,
and I didn't want to have to rent up units fast and indiscriminately in
order to meet an oppressive debt service. So I kept saying, no, I don't
think we need to borrow that much money; I don't want to borrow that
much money. I want to be able to go slow and do the rehabs at our pace,
and not only not have to rent up in a hurry, but also to be able to
rehab in an ecologically sensitive way, using non-toxic building
materials and paints and varnishes and certified woods, and things like
cork, real cork and real linoleum, and take -- all kinds of things like
that. So I knew that we couldn't do that if we had to do everything in a
hurry.And so I kept just raising more money, and with this prospectus, I
started sending it out to everyone that we knew personally that were
among our constituents for 13, 14, 15 years, and knew us and trusted us,
and people that I knew had money, and it took us nine months, but we
raised about $500,000, and through our ecological revolving loan fund.
They were loans, and they were all simple loans; they were loans without
leins. At first I think I had developed a six-page loan agreement,
because I wanted them to feel really confident about everything, even
though there was no collateral, other than the building itself. But no
leins on it. And then I wanted them to know, eventually, that their
loans were to our loan fund rather than to the building itself. So they
were like handshake loans. But one lender, who was loaning us $100,000,
he read the loan agreement, six page, and he cut it down to half a page.
And I thought, "Wow! Well, if he's loaning us $100,000, and he's willing
to do it on just this half page, then we'll just do that for the rest of
our lenders.
-
COLLINGS
- So this was your ecological --
-
ARKIN
- -- revolving loan fund.
-
COLLINGS
- That's right, the ELF program.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. And so we paid -- so all of the -- and the other way we structured
the finance, we structured it so that we didn't even have to start
paying back on those loans for at least three or four or five or six
months after we'd closed on the building to give us some breathing room,
and the other thing that we did is that we made all of those initial
loans interest-only, so we didn't have to start paying back on the
principal for at least, I think, 18 months, so that would give us some
further breathing space, and then we have the pro-formas, so that we
knew we would be able to afford to do all of this, even with only the 23
units rented, we'd be able to afford it. And then the third thing we did
is we really wanted to pay our lenders quarterly, instead of monthly, to
cut down on the paperwork, because we had 35 loans. And so all of that
was done, and we never -- it's quite embarrassing, actually, but I think
the first set of payments we went, we sent them the wrong -- we sent
them from a closed checking account. (laughter) It was very
embarrassing. But other than that, we never, ever missed a payment in
the ten years that this building was being paid off. And as of December
of 2006, all of the loans outside of the organization were actually paid
back.
-
COLLINGS
- How exciting.
-
ARKIN
- Now we have internal loans, because we have loans from our -- we still
have each building debt service, and we had put in about $150,000 of our
own money that had been actually donated for eventually what ended up
being $815,000, because we paid $315,000 for the building next door.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, did your any of your board members have a financial planning
background? How were you able to structure this very complicated debt?
-
ARKIN
- And it's such a good question, and I think the main thing is, by knowing
so little, that sometimes the less you know, the more you're able to
accomplish. And I think a lot of people in positions like mine, if they
could see ahead what they were going to go through, with so many things,
it would be so overwhelming they wouldn't begin. But if you keep your
eye on the ultimate vision, and just take, essentially, one -- if you
have a sense of what all the steps are, but you don't go into any of the
details.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, because it sounds like you took a lot of stuff from your dad, in
terms of the building and what have you. But financial planning was not
your thing; you wanted to sell the stock rather than take a look at it.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah.
-
COLLINGS
- But did you do anything along these lines for the Songwriter's Resource?
-
ARKIN
- Oh, yeah, I was responsible for all the income and (inaudible); I
certainly had some expertise, even at a fairly elementary level, at
bookkeeping; I was always wonderful at balancing my check account, my
checkbook. And of course, by that time I had already been running a --
doing all the bookkeeping for the non-profit organization for that time,
all the 15 years. You know, if you have the basic intelligence, you
don't have to be super-smart or anything; it's not like a science -- if
you see an example of what someone else did, then you just adapt it to
your own needs, which is what I did with the prospectus; I got an
example of another non-profit developer that was doing something, and I
thought that looked really good how he did that, and I just adapted it
to our needs. And the same thing with the pro-formas that the wonderful
LISC person did; he crunched all the numbers, and although I didn't have
his crunching program, I could see how the numbers flowed, and I could
do like a 15-year spreadsheet. And then I just kept doing that and
re-doing that each year for the various lenders, all the lenders and the
payments due, and I could pretty much do it. And no one -- of course, my
board president is an architect/builder, and so he had some -- he asked
good questions, he knows a bit about this.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. But is ELF your term? Is this something -- when you referred to
this plan in your book here as the Ecological Community Revolving Loan
Fund: is that sort of the formal name that you gave to this plan?
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. And to the project of CRSP. So it's one of the projects that was
under CRSP's umbrella, and just like there were times in our history
where we've umbrella'd probably eight or ten different emerging
organizations, including the Los Angeles Film and Video co-op, which won
a big award in the '80s, or (inaudible). And we umbrella'd another
organization that was a video group that was doing environmental films
years ago, Turtle Island, I think it was called. And we umbrella'd Co-op
Camp Sierra, which is a seven-five -- when I said umbrella'd, we were
the fiscal umbrella for, in some cases the startup of an organization,
and in some cases, taken on that fiscal responsibility from another
organization as we do the Co-op Camp Sierra, which I believe at this
point is a 75-year-old two-week summer camp for people involved in
cooperatives held up in the Sierras. So we passed that along to another
non-profit about a year or so ago. And then we've umbrella'd, of course,
the Bicycle Kitchen.Oh, let's see. I don't know, it seems like a half-dozen or so of these
organization that either use our umbrella to do what it is that they
wanted to do when their project finished, and the umbrella finished, or
they were incubated and became successful and went out on their own. So
it's a wonderful thing to be able to do that. And so we have many
internal projects now, the ELF being one, which someday I would hope is
going to spin off. The other organization, emerging organization, we've
umbrellaed in the past few years, is the Beverly Vermont Community Land
Trust, which is finally going to manifest that early vision for the LA
Eco-Villages, that the land should be owned by a land trust, and the
buildings are to be owned by a co-op, and so the land trust is
happening; I believe the articles of incorporation are being final this
week, next week, and we've worked on the by-laws, and we've had a
volunteer legal aide attorney working with us, developing it. And the
CRA is excited about it.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, this is another site, because Beverly is south of here --
-
ARKIN
- The Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust essentially will -- we don't
have firm boundaries, but essentially, we talked initially about the
areas within a specific plan known as the Station Neighborhood Area Plan
of the City of Los Angeles that many of us were very involved in helping
to formulate. And then also, the community -- the Wilshire
Center/Koreatown redevelopment area, of which we were also in by choice,
both of those areas. And so this is kind of the overlapping area around
those two areas.So -- around those two planning areas. And those kind of planning areas,
of course, bring with them the potential for quite a bit of public money
as well as private money. But our idea is that we should have a
community land trust, which there is an emerging land trust movement in
Los Angeles and across the country, the past -- across the country for
probably the past 20 or 30 years, but in Los Angeles, just the past year
or so, and it's coming up fairly quickly now, and we're kind of in the
forefront of it, along with the Figueroa Corridor and several other
grassroots groups.And so this area, Beverly-Vermont -- we don't have firm boundaries, but
it's kind of a hub, a transit hub. And theoretically, our area would be
within a few-mile radius, but we didn't want to say, oh, we wouldn't
take housing or land that wanted to come to us from outlying areas,
because we want to primarily serve this area, and in a way that really
is both about ecological land and building stewardship, as well as
affordable housing, social and ecological justice issues, and
essentially breaking the back of real estate speculation in the area.
(laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- OK. Well, there's a lot more that we need to talk about regarding
eco-village, of course. But I think we should probably mostly talk about
it next time. But before we end today, would you mind going back a
little bit and just talking about your initial plans for eco-village at
the 11-acre site, and how far along you got with those? I mean, you
write about a meeting that took place with the Montecito Heights
Improvement Association, where neighborhood people were present but did
not speak in favor of the site, even though you believed that they were
interested in it. And I'm just sort of wondering about what some of the
dynamics were, and really how far the planning got for that before you
change course in the aftermath of the uprising.
-
ARKIN
- I want to mention the person whose name is Maria Davalos; she was an
early co-visionary with eco-village, and she -- her co-visionary
approach really had to do with children and fruit trees, and it's where
all of our ideas for the fruit-tree program, where the kids, it might be
fun to -- I haven't talked to her in several years, and I'd love to
chit-chat with her, and she doesn't live that far away, but she's not
online, and it's almost like, when we all went online, I lost touch with
so many people, I didn't stay in touch with. But Maria and I, I met
Maria, incidentally, through Andy Lipkis, because she was a friend of
his.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, really? Small world.
-
ARKIN
- I think she had -- I met her that way because she had invited Andy to her
house, and -- I don't remember (inaudible), but she was definitely a
friend of Andy's. So Maria and I, before we had all of this
architectural support, and we would do -- go door to door talking to
people. Now, that area of Montecito Heights had both a valley that's
called Happy Valley neighborhood that is mostly lower-income and mostly
a Mexican population, in many cases second and third-generation
population where the properties are handed down through the generations,
and so they actually had quite a bit of real affordable housing by
keeping a lot of those houses in the families. And as you went up the
side of the hill, of course, and the top of the hill, it got much more
affluent, and the demographic was considerably different. It was quite
mixed, ethnically, but substantially white middle-class or upper-middle
-- middle-class even at that time -- well, no, I guess -- yeah, because
property values had already crashed at that time.So we would go door to door in both areas, and we would find that there
was great enthusiasm at the lower end of the Happy Valley, at the lower
end of the hill, but we never really identified any leadership, we could
kind of get involved with what we were doing. "Oh, let us know when
something happens." And at the top of the hill, there was very
extraordinarily limited enthusiasm. Most people at the top of the hill
that looked out at this three-acre shelf, and then there were -- it was
no landfill, so there were angles, the land angled down like a 45-degree
angle and then there'd be maybe a 30 or 40 foot shelf and there were
several levels. But the three-acre shelf at the top was buildable, and
the rest of it was not buildable. But gardens and porches could be
planted on those shelves and on those hills.And so we envisioned this wonderful -- several co-housing communities on
the three acres, and mixed uses, and we envisioned -- we were right
adjacent to [Deb's] Park, and we were -- the Southwest Museum was at the
bottom of the hill across from the Pasadena Freeway on the other side of
the hill, and then there was the historic [Carroll] Street -- not
Carroll Street -- the historic -- the old historic buildings on our side
of there, and also -- anyway, close by. Trying to think of the name of
it; I'm so embarrassed not to be remembering that. And so our visions
took us to -- and also being adjacent to Deb's Park, it's really
interesting, what's across, not so very close but still pretty close,
the Audubon Center, which was one of the most environmentally
sustainable buildings in the country, LEED [Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design], the national standard for sustainability]
platinum, but we envisioned a center like that adjacent to the
three-acre shelf there in Deb's Park, which the Audubon Center is in
Deb's Park, and so eventually in the long term, we could see electric
shuttles going from the Center like the Audubon, Center down to the
Southwest Museum, which was ancient --
-
COLLINGS
- Well, now there's the Gold Line running right through there.
-
ARKIN
- Well, yeah --
-
COLLINGS
- It's nearby.
-
ARKIN
- You'd still need an electric shuttle going up and down the hills,
connecting the eco-center, such as the Audubon, to the ancient Southwest
Center, to the old historic houses that had been moved there as a
tourist attraction, and then the eco-village, and I could just see all
that being tied together. And of course, I still can, because that shelf
is still there. Now that landfill site was scheduled for public auction,
did I say that?
-
COLLINGS
- Mm-hmm.
-
ARKIN
- OK. And we did have it removed from public auction, and it is still
currently owned by the Department of Water and Power, and I still think
the time is approaching where it could be an eco-village, and that would
be manifested perhaps not exactly as I envision it, but as we did our
community organizing at the top of the hill, we -- and also at that
time, we were in close relationship with Cal Hamilton, the planning
director for the city, and somewhat naive -- I loved Cal; I thought he
was just a remarkable and wonderful human being, and of course, everyone
is not a fan of his, but I think he really meant well, even if he wasn't
able to manifest any of his visions for a sustainable Los Angeles; I
think he had a lot of them. And he later had Alzheimer's; I visited with
him several times after his retirement when he was ill. But we even --
so we even asked the Homeowner's Association to set up a meeting where
we would have Cal come and talk to them. Little did we understand that
they were very anti-city.So essentially, the people that we talked to on the topic, they didn't
want one grain of sand moved from that landfill; they just wanted it to
stay the way it was, nothing. And they didn't trust us, as often as we
tried to go to their events, we didn't really know -- we did eventually
get to be friends with one or two people, people that would turn it
around, and so the issue -- they didn't really understand, no matter how
much we tried to explain, and no matter how many sketches we showed,
they didn't really understand any of the things that we were trying to
do, and they didn't want to, essentially, and they didn't really care.
Actually, I have a cousin that lives up there now, so.
-
COLLINGS
- So what was it that they objected to? Just that there would be
construction?
-
ARKIN
- Well, the construction, affordable housing, obviously, so it was early
NIMBY-ism. There was no eco-consciousness about anything at that time.
And so just -- "We don't want change." So that's how it was, then, and
that is how it is still -- not necessarily there, because I haven't been
up there in a long time, and I don't know who lives there know; I mean,
they might have gotten quite a progressive community up there. But so
many neighborhoods that kind of have their heads in the sand about the
times we live in and the times we're moving into, and it's kind of like,
they just go on like America owns the world, like my job in the world is
to get the best bargain I can at the most malls I can go to, and I think
that I don't want -- I mean, obviously a lot of those people are people
that I love very dearly, including my own family (laughter), and people
that I know that are wonderful people, so I'm not -- one of the great
challenges in this work is essentially to avoid judgement -- being
judgmental and self-righteous about anything.But the reality is, of course, that we're seeing in the mainstream media,
and that we see as soon as we walk out on the corner of First and
Vermont and see the traffic that has doubled or tripled in the past year
or so with cars growing six times faster than the number of people. And
33% of global greenhouse gas coming from vehicle pollution, and another
third of it, I think, coming from buildings and households. So we are
essentially not doing very well. So that's who a lot of Americans are
still today, and here in Los Angeles, among the most progressive cities,
theoretically, in the world, but we are still very spread out, and
sometimes I think people don't know how to connect -- they know that
something need to be done, and I want to do something, but I'm not sure
what to do, in spite of the fact that they oftentimes are not reading
the papers. Things are changing very rapidly. So at any rate -- did I
answer -- let me just finish. When the earthquake came, and when we
started -- at the -- excuse me, when the uprisings came, I'm so sorry,
in 1992 --
-
COLLINGS
- Spring of '92.
-
ARKIN
- That's right, April 27, 28, 29, or something like that, I had just come
back from an international eco-cities conference in Australia, and the
next day, the city went up in flames. And -- I forgot what I was going
to say, I'm sorry.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, we were talking about how far the planning had really gone with the
first vision.
-
ARKIN
- Oh, yeah. So when we started to -- after the uprisings, and we put this
committee that had been meeting -- well, we put this committee together
after that; we actually changed its focus, it was kind of the planning
committee for the eco-village, and it was a combination of the planning
committee from the eco-village planning, and something we called the Los
Angeles Eco-Cities Council, which had been put together by my
organization and the Eco-Home network after the first Los Angeles
Eco-Cities Conference, out of which this book was done. And so that was
the committee that we put together, and on Monday after the riots, that
weekend, while people were out in our adjacent strip mall sweeping and
cleaning and so forth, I was here in my computer, envisioning an
eco-village, envisioning, in a way that I had, essentially taking what
was in this book and putting it into a form that would be meaningful for
a neighborhood that had been deeply affected by the fires.And so that six months of meeting with that committee was dialoguing
around the question, what should our priorities be in inner-city Los
Angeles, which I think I mentioned before. And it was out of that
six-month dialogue, seven-month, eight-month dialogue that we
unanimously decided to drop our intent to work on the landfill site and
switch to this neighborhood. This neighborhood, and essentially part of
that dialogue was about what some of the problems were that were going
on up there, that we really were not invited, we were not wanted; there
were going to be battles, there was essentially the issue of creating
infrastructure -- the closest bus line ran only -- there was only one
bus line that was in easy walking distance, and it only ran up once
every 45 minutes. So it was going to be 15-20 years to create the
infrastructure in that neighborhood that we already had in many of the
other neighborhoods that had been deeply affected by the fires.So it was, as we considered all of that, it was ultimately a no-brainer.
The big thing during the discussion of those six months was, where will
we have it? Where will we do this in a neighborhood that was deeply
affected by the fires? And no one on that committee, in spite of the
fact that that committee was well-integrated, ethnically and racially,
none of those people wanted to move to any of the areas that had been
deeply affected by the fires. And so it ultimately, for me, because a
no-brainer. Well, I already live here, so at least there's one person
living intentionally, because I felt passionately that wherever we would
do the eco-village, it was a place that the people who wanted to do it
would live, that you don't -- we're not a traditional community
development organization that goes home to our house in the suburbs
every day, and then comes and works in wherever we're going to do this
thing.And so I was passionate about that, and so that ultimately became a
no-brainer choice. Well, we have, after considering several other
neighborhoods in South-Central that no one wanted to move to, well, we
had fires here too; we had a fire on the front porch of the building was
living in then, fires back to back. So let's do it here. And it became
just a very enthusiastic unanimous decision to do it that way, and then
it was a matter of beginning the processes. So most eco-villages will
begin with the kind of planning processes we did with the
three-dimensional models and the architecture drawings and the
participation of community members and the design and where we're going
to get the money all together and people putting in their money, and we
kind of did things backwards in that sense.We had all of that planning done and then decided not to do it, and it
was -- although there was a lot of process in that planning there, here,
when we decided, oh, we're already built up, so what's the word that we
use for making an eco-village where you're already built up? Oh,
no-brainer -- "retrofit," as distinct from rehabilitation, building
rehab, housing rehab is what you hear constantly. For example, the
redevelopment world, or in the housing development world, where if
someone's buying your old building and rehabbing it for -- to bring it
up to snuff. But the idea of retrofitting for sustainability is the way
in which we wanted to think about. So it wasn't -- it was retrofitting
not only physically, but retrofitting socially, and retrofitting
economically, one of the different forms, one of the different ways, in
the many, many systems within those macro-systems, the social, economic,
and ecological, that we would --
-
COLLINGS
- So I guess that sort of speaks to one of the questions that I had,
because when I looked at the plan that was described by the study group
from Cal Poly for the original eco-station, eco-village site --
-
ARKIN
- Oh, the Diane Herring thing?
-
COLLINGS
- No, it was under Professor -- let's see -- it's this one right here.
-
ARKIN
- Oh, wow. This is so interesting, I don't even know about it and I wrote
it. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. The interesting thing about it is that -- it's kind of going
through step-by-step what the ecological features of the 11-acre
eco-village site will be, but it doesn't really emphasize the
neighborhood, the social retrofitting that you're talking about, which
has become such an important part of this site. And I'm just wondering
if you had proceeded with this. I mean, see, here's the sort of the
list; it's solid waste, renewable energy, passive solar, but it doesn't
discuss things that have to do with the people.
-
ARKIN
- OK. So that was --
-
COLLINGS
- And that's more of what I see here, so I'm just -- that's just an
interesting --
-
ARKIN
- So that was -- I have to tell you, I think that it was an academic; it
was something I knew academically, that the people had to come first,
the people that lived there, the neighbors that were going to be -- I
knew that academically, but I didn't know it emotionally until we spent
those three or four years, five years, trying to organize in that
community. And that hit me really hard, and I became a very, very strong
advocate within the intentional communities, the co-housing and the
eco-village movement, do not plan things without having made friends
with your neighbors first about where you want to do something, and that
is a message that many intentional communities of various sorts, and had
very, very hard lessons. And so the fact --
-
COLLINGS
- That's the thing that's so striking about these conference proceedings;
there is so much discussion of infrastructure. They're like these
uninhabited spaces because there isn't this other discussion.
-
ARKIN
- Yes, that's true. Those were obviously lessons from that. (laughter) This
conference was much too physically-oriented, I should say. But there
have been many lessons, and of course, many -- of course the whole
co-housing movement, many of those developments are emerging
eco-villages, and many eco-villages use co-housing as their housing
component. But it takes a long time to kind of develop all of that, but
co-housing is a very, very social kind of thing, because all the
households that are going to live in it, of course, are planning the
whole thing and going through the whole two-to-five-year planning period
where you get to know each other very, very well, doing that kind of
thing. To me, that was a very big lesson for -- on an emotional basis,
and why, in a way, it was so wonderful that we didn't have an instant
intentional community to move to this neighborhood, but there were
volunteers that came in.I would also say, and sadly, sadly so, in a way, that it is much easier
to do something like this in a neighborhood like this, than in a more
affluent single-family neighborhood. And yet I see the future of
eco-villages, whether urban, suburban, or rural, that we have to
retrofit, particularly our residential urban, single-family detached
housing neighborhoods, and our suburban neighborhoods. The great example
for that, which you may be familiar with, is the [N Street] Co-Housing
Group in Davis, which is a suburb, and they essentially did a whole
block of single-family homes, where they opened up the backyards and
little by little, over 10 or 15 years, (inaudible) --
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, I was reading about that, it's -- and people just consider it to be
a very desirable place to live.
-
ARKIN
- It's wonderful, it's really great. So we have to do a whole lot more of
that sort of thing. But my lessons were certainly, make friends with
your neighbors, and we had three years to do that before we bought our
building. And of course, when we bought this building, we already knew
all the 23 households that lived here from that three years, and also, I
knew some of them from before we started eco-village, because even
though I didn't know anyone well, I had already lived on the block 13
years when we started, so faces were familiar; I would have some very
casual conversations with some of the neighbors. But -- so they were
very, very grateful and happy that we bought the building, because --
and we even lowered their rents (laughter) within months after buying
the building, because they were too high for the time, they really were.
I mean, not so terribly much; I think $50 or something. And so, let me
see.Oh, so the emphasis in this community, over this past 14 years now, 13,
14, has really been creating social foundation, but what I learned, and
I think you heard me say it, and if I didn't say it I will say it now,
that what I knew from being a co-op consultant in the early days of
CRSP, was -- because I trained boards of directors, and I gave advice to
staff of food co-ops, housing co-ops, childcare co-ops, worker co-ops
all over the country. And did some traveling, particularly training
boards of directors, because I had become like a certified board
trainer, and I'd become a certified non-profit board trainer as well as
a co-op board trainer too, so assisting local non-profits that way. And
the thing that I had learned is what kind of co-op I didn't want to live
in, because all of the housing co-ops that I was assisting and continued
to, were having horrible, horrible problems. There was litigation among
board members, between the residents and the board, there was so many
tensions; I found this in food co-ops also, incredible tension.I mean, their organizational growth, their organizational development
patterns, and organizations, regardless of whether you're a co-op or a
conventional corporation or an intentional community, they often
parallel what the stages of development are of human beings. There's
planning, pregnancy, birth, infancy, childhood, preadolescence,
adolescence, youth, adulthood. And so this intentional community has
gone through all those phases, and I would say -- and so i think it's
really important to understand that, and not to expect instant success;
no matter how much planning you do, at a certain point, you have to let
go of certain things. You don't want to let go of certain things too
early, because you don't want to compromise your vision; that's advice I
got from James Rouse. James Rouse is the person who actually ultimately
started the Enterprise Foundation, but he's a very, very big, important
guy. I think he died some years ago. But very big developer, nationally,
and particularly with shopping malls and for-profit housing and
eventually non-profit housing, and eventually his passions were for
affordable housing, and that's why he started the Enterprise Foundation.But I saw him speak a couple times here in LA, and one of the things he
had said is, "Beware of early compromises of your vision." But at a
certain point, you do let go, and then you -- if you're still involved,
you're kind of like, oh, how can I kind of jiggle this, what's going on
toward what I envisioned going on, without overlaying your authority
onto a social group. And so there was lots and lots and lots of that
that has gone on. We also, in our intentional community, which is now
almost 40 people, I think. We made -- and I take responsibility for
this, we were much too -- we were much too accepting of people in the
early -- and even the middle stages.Now, I'm hoping that we don't have to learn those lessons all over again,
because this is a year in which pretty much most of the membership
activities are being -- membership selection activities -- are being
passed on to the community. And I probably will not have too much to do
with it much longer, other than just be one of the people that can give
input, which I always saw myself as doing anyway, but the community
didn't see me that way. I guess we'll probably maybe save that whole
history of my relationship with the community for next time, but the
whole emphasis has been on pretty much the social foundation for moving
on to a more economic relation.So in other words, if we're going to be 40 people that own $1
million-plus dollar -- a couple million dollar business together, don't
we want to be in loving trust with one another before we take on those
business arrangements? And that was what I worked for, my early co-op
consulting days. I did not want to be in business with people who were
at war with one another. And that was not something that I successfully
avoided here, because I was in business, even if I was not co-owners
yet, with the people that I was community with, that community -- there
were many, many dysfunctional aspects to it, and many, many wonderful
lessons that I and others here have learned since we started, since we
moved into this building and had the intentional community. But there
were warning signs even before we bought the building and expanded the
community, even with the initial seven or eight people that lived here
before we bought the building that lived in rental housing in other
parts of the neighborhood. We definitely still had lessons from them. So
-- or I did.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. Well, we'll have to get that on the record.
-
ARKIN
- Did I get all those basic questions, though, do you think?
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, I think we did, and I think we can expand next time.
-
ARKIN
- Oh, you are so good at getting me back on track with those questions.
(laughter)
END OF Arkin.Lois.4.05.04.2007.mp3
1.6. Session 5 ( May 11, 2007)
-
- UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 5, 5-11-2007
Arkin.Lois.6.05.23.2007.mp3
-
COLLINGS
- Jane Collings interviewing Lois Arkin, May 11, 2007, in her office.
-
ARKIN
- Live/work space.
-
COLLINGS
- And workspace, yes. Good morning.
-
ARKIN
- Hi. So I suppose I really want to emphasize, also particularly to try to
inspire other people to begin, because lots of times, people think, oh,
they have to go out and raise lots of money and find property, and it's
very, very complicated to begin an eco-village.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. Well, your original plan was very complicated, the 11-acre site,
yeah.
-
ARKIN
- This is true. (laughter) And it's not that where we're at now is not
complicated; it certainly is. But whether we were starting the hill, or
whether we were starting in our existing neighborhood, the important
thing is that it's process-oriented, rather -- from my perspective,
other people have a different idea, they're maybe architects that are
very, very physically-oriented, and so they maybe start with big
drawings, and other people that are really, really passionate about
saving a piece of land that might go to conventional development of a
landfill or something like that, and so end up emphasizing certain
physical or economic realities. But from my perspective, and I really
think that this is important for those people who start from a physical
perspective or an economic perspective too, if you don't have the social
properties down pat, and even when you think you do, it can be a very,
very difficult path to travel.But I wanted to emphasize that we didn't really have the kinds of
resources that we were aware of to begin an eco-village, and so we began
with our -- basically our extraordinarily grassroots interactive
processes, talking to neighbors, as I think I mentioned, working with
kids on the street, and that was the way we began. One thing that we did
do in those early days is, within the first few months, is that we put
out a flier throughout the neighborhood, and invited people to come to a
meeting, in which we would ask them what they perceived as the strengths
and weaknesses of our neighborhood. And of course, we never got beyond
the very first one, which was crime. That's all they wanted -- there
weren't that many people at the meetings.
-
COLLINGS
- How many people were there?
-
ARKIN
- Oh, maybe six or eight. (laughter) So not too many. Probably half of
those six or eight people were people that were part of our volunteer
team in the beginning. But all the neighbors wanted to talk about was
crime, and we kind of talked amongst ourselves after that, and if we
were a conventional community development organization, we would have
immediately gone out and organized a neighborhood watch. But because we
understood, and believed that crime was symptomatic of the breakdown of
the community, and that the fear of crime was so much more debilitating
that crime itself, we decided to really work on the community aspects of
things.And that's when we -- I think I talked about last time, we went out on
the streets every day meeting neighbors, doing positive gossip, working
with the kids, doing little tree plantings and little garden plantings
and so forth, and simply being a real presence on the street. And then
about six months later, we had a similar meeting; a few more people
came, but again we asked people what the strengths and weaknesses were
of the neighborhood. Within that six-month period, with all of that kind
of process on the street where crime came on the third page of our
brainstorm list, and it came as an afterthought. "Oh, yeah, we still
have to think about crime." And one of the things that I think was real
instrumental in that switch in people's heads was that because we had
been putting out this newsletter, which I do believe I talked about last
time, is that correct?
-
COLLINGS
- You mentioned it, but you didn't talk about how it was put together, what
kinds of things you chose to include and so forth.
-
ARKIN
- And I did say I'd give you a set of -- OK, yes, I will. Well, it was a
newsletter that talked about things that were going on in the
neighborhood, things that we envisioned to go on in the neighborhood,
how to get involved, what kinds of committees were forming, if we were
having special events in the neighborhood, who the speakers were, and so
forth.
-
COLLINGS
- Would it be in English and Spanish?
-
ARKIN
- And some of them were in just English, and eventually, some of them were
bilingual and even trilingual; we did a few in Korean as well. And so
when we did those newsletters and/or those information sheets, we went
door-to-door, and then with a bilingual person, and so we were able to
really talk to our neighbors. And so, let's see, before I started that
--
-
COLLINGS
- Well, let me just ask you -- I have two questions. One is, who is we?
Because you are living down this street, but don't have the other cast
of characters. And what do you consider the boundaries of the
neighborhood?
-
ARKIN
- Well, the "we" is, in those first year, year and a half, were the group
of volunteers that came in regularly; there were about half a dozen that
came regularly to the neighborhood, where we'd walk the streets, or we'd
do gardening together, work with the kids and so forth. And I would say
it was about a year and a half before people actually started moving to
the neighborhood intentionally, and that was actually before we owned
any property, so they just like moved into other rental housing,
essentially pretty much the four-plexes on White House Place. There was
one very large unit, White House Place, where one, two, three, four --
at one time, five people were living. It was a very large two-bedroom
unit, but eventually, I think only three people lived there for awhile.
And down the block, other people moved into a few other units. So then
that became the "we," along with the volunteers that were still coming
in regularly, working with the gardens and the school and so forth.The boundaries in, I believe -- I'm not sure if I actually gave a
definition of an eco-village, but a couple of the components of the
definition are that an eco-village be small enough that everyone knows
one another face-to-face and can influence the direction of the
community. And from that perspective, if you stand in the intersection
of White House and Bimini Place, you have visual access of the entire
two blocks. It's kind of like an unbalanced T. And there's about 500
people that live in those two blocks, which I think I mentioned earlier;
162 units of housing. And so those became our self-selected boundaries,
White House Place to its dead end on the east, and Bimini Place from 1st
Street on the north to 2nd Street on the south.
-
COLLINGS
- Not 3rd? 2nd?
-
ARKIN
- No. 2nd Street.
-
COLLINGS
- You went down to 2nd.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. And so those were the boundaries, because that is what we had
visual access to; those two blocks contained about 500 people; its land
uses were mixed and/or adjacent to many other mixed land uses, where we
could do shopping. Another component of an eco-village is that it is
full-featured, and in urban terms, that means that its land uses are
mixed to the extent that people can meet their daily needs within or
adjacent to the community, or at least not have to get into a private
automobile to go off to get their basic shopping done, education,
livelihood, spiritual and religious spaces, and so forth. So obviously,
not the chi-chi shops in Beverly Hills.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, and speaking of the shops, does that strip mall that is directly
behind you -- do the shopowners there have a palpable sense that
eco-village is here?
-
ARKIN
- No, I don't believe that they do. From time to time, some of them have,
because there was one little restaurant there that many of us used to go
to regularly, and so any time you would walk by, you'd kind of see if --
oftentimes, especially in the evening, a few eco-villagers having
dinner. And so I think we got to know some of the proprietors there and
the waitresses fairly well. But that most of the businesses on Vermont
are franchises, and large global franchises, and it's not -- those are
not the kinds of businesses that eco-villagers generally patronize, for
the most part. And their staff are changing constantly, and these are
kind of low-paid jobs that people going to school, retired people,
immigrants are working in, so they're not very permanent in any way.
They're also a leaky barrel, in terms of the money that comes into the
community, in terms of global corporations; that money generally leaks
out of a neighborhood pretty intensely. And those -- oftentimes, those
businesses -- and again, I don't want to overgeneralize, but generally
speaking, global corporations of that nature are responsible for the
most debilitating practices, oppressive and exploitative practices, and
so we're not great fans.Now, we do live with our neighbors, and we certainly interact with them;
I am, like others, shop fairly regularly at Radio Shack to purchase
little electronic things that I need here and there, and I am a great
fan of the Subway franchise, just because I think that of all the fast
food places that I've ever been to, they have -- not to be the
promotional person in this oral interview, but they do actually have the
low-cal veggie sandwiches, and very affordable. I'm trying to think of
-- I think I stopped with -- we have some chain pizza place around the
corner, and I think I stopped that several years ago. So this is kind of
what the nature of -- now, some of us really have a very strong vision
of bringing one of the very small mini-malls adjacent to us under
community control --
-
COLLINGS
- That's the one right behind you.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. And that we would like to see that happen, and eventually integrate
with eco-village as part of a mixed-use development. Some of us have a
vision for doing several more developments in and adjacent to our two
blocks that would be included in the eco-village, using, for example,
co-housing as the housing component, but doing it in a way that the land
uses are mixed. And also, our vision takes us to really passionately,
some of us, wanting to do a car-free development. So we talk about
making, initially, the north end of the block car-free, or maybe the
south-end, and maybe have --
-
COLLINGS
- Turning these into walk streets.
-
ARKIN
- Turning both Bimini and White House Place into 100% car-free streets.
This is not to say that people couldn't still own cars, but over the
years, we could see -- or at least, I could, and some of my neighbors
along with me, could see radically reducing the number of automobiles,
and perhaps within a certain time period having no privately-owned
automobiles, but just having access to car-sharing organizations, like
Flexcar, to have automobiles on the block, and a variety of different
kinds of vehicles, so there's motorcycles and scooters and little
neighborhood electric cars, and an SUV for when you need, or one of
those large passenger vehicles for when you need to take a lot of people
someplace, or little flatbed truck things and so forth, so that there is
the sharing of vehicles that way. But for the most part, our basic
transportation is by feet and bike and --
-
COLLINGS
- Public. But while we're on the subject, it's a little sort of off the
chronology, but where do people who live here tend to shop? I mean, are
there certain businesses that people agree are the best places?
-
ARKIN
- Well, you know, that's a really interesting question. I keep saying I'm
going to actually create a list of all the thrift shops in the area, but
I do think that people do a lot of thrift shop shopping for clothes; we
also do quite a bit of sharing, so we have, for example, in our lobby, a
large white table, and whenever someone doesn't want something or
doesn't need something anymore, they put it on the white table --
sometimes it tends to get very messy -- and people go through that and
pick things up, whether they're clothes or shoes or handbags or wallets
or books, we actually have a free bookcase, so anyone can take a book
from that bookcase, and then we have another common library; we have
people now have a food co-op, so they're getting their fresh -- a lot of
us are getting our fresh produce weekly from our food co-op from one of
the organic farmers that comes to the Hollywood farmer's market Sunday,
so then they deliver to us after the market, and they've kept our boxes
fresh for delivery in their trucks.But then, I believe that there are a lot of people here that shop
regularly for groceries at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and Nature Mart.
I tend to do a lot of my basic shopping at the corner at Vons, and that
is because of the convenience, and also Vons now is carrying a very
strong line of organic everything; we call that "industrial organic,"
because of course, when the Fed passed the new organic laws, they
significantly reduced the requirements that we had, California-certified
organic was of course the standard for organic in the whole world, and
then when the Fed passed the law, they actually lowered the standard, so
now we have what we call industrial organic. But nonetheless, tried to
-- I think most people here tried to buy things that are local, that are
used. There are people that do a lot of garage sale and flea market
shopping.
-
COLLINGS
- There's one down the street on Vermont [Ave] every Sunday.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, but there's also front-yard garage sales all around this
neighborhood all the time. Many people bring things home that they found
on the street. And I know that I have, from time to time, found things
on the street that I brought into the office, bookcases and chairs and
tables and so forth. And then sometimes when we're out walking or biking
and are not able to carry something home, we'll come home and put it on
our internal listserv: "Oh, on such-and-such a street, I saw
blah-blah-blah, and it looked like it was in perfect condition. Does
someone want to go pick it up?" That sort of thing. But I think that --
you know, I imagine that there are also people that occasionally stop in
kind of the mainstream places, but I think overall, we don't shop very
much.And part of being an eco-village, I think, is reducing consumption and
demonstrating that we can live at a higher quality of life with less
stuff. And because we live in small spaces, we don't have room for much
stuff. And actually, there are a few of us that it's very, very hard to
resist stuff, good stuff that we find on the street, or bargains in the
thrift shops, or things that -- oh, maybe I don't need it right now, but
I bet maybe someone else might need it, and can't resist bringing it
home or buying it, and this does become a very serious problem. And the
housekeeping and the junk factor are issues that have been ongoing --
along with cats -- continuing issues of contention in the community. And
so we're getting better at it, but there have been times where just --
have too much junk around.And it's interesting, because we have one actual junk room that's been
cleaned out at least three or four times in the past ten years,
including like major garage sales in front of our building that went on
all day, and (inaudible), and then they get all cleaned out, and then a
year later, they're so full of junk again you can't get through them.
But the community is now, I think, really -- there are some people that
are getting much more militant about it, and it's hard, because I happen
to believe that if you have the junk, quote-unquote, really well
organized and accessible, and know what you have and where it is, and
you've created the storage space to make it accessible, and not
unattractive, then it's a good thing to have a lot of that kind of stuff
around. But we haven't been so good at it. Hopefully that will change.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. So how many people are we talking about now? And then we really
need to backtrack to the early days.
-
ARKIN
- Sure. Well, the number of intentional neighbors that have moved here is
now at about 38, I believe. And of those, I'd say 20 to 25 are pretty
active, and maybe a dozen not so active.
-
COLLINGS
- And those 38 live in this building and in the surrounding four-plexes.
-
ARKIN
- Most of them live in this, the big building, a few in the smaller
building next door that is owned by our non-profit, and a few down the
block. So there's quite an extent. Of course, the original vision was
that not only would we have people that moved here intentionally, but
the pre-existing neighbors, as well as people that just might move into
the neighborhood and bypass a very complex process, moving into the
buildings that we own, would eventually all become eco-villagers. That
is, people that want to live in a more cooperative, in a more
ecologically sensitive neighborhood. And so -- and that is still the
vision that I have, and I think that maybe a few of my neighbors do
share with me, where -- and I feel that I want to focus a lot more on
that, as we did in the very beginning. Those first two years, those
first three years, all of my time was spent on the streets; I knew
pretty much every person in the neighborhood, or at least where they
lived, and they knew me. And that was true of a few others of us that
were organizing and interacting in those early years. And then when it
was time to buy property, I think we talked about this last time, to
some extent.
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, how you organized the funding for the -- yeah.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. And so there was no time to do anything else but bury myself in
learning how to be a real estate developer, that kind of thing. And then
of course, once that happened, oh, it was managing a building that was
like a total slum, and half-vacant, and also not really being
experienced in that, and initially, we were planning to essentially farm
out the management to a west-side firm that really wanted to learn about
sustainability from us, and we wanted to learn about management from
them. But as it turned out, it just didn't seem very viable that we
would do that, and that we really needed to learn how to do it
ourselves. And so we didn't eventually remain hooked up with that
organization.But we did learn a lot about management, and we learned a lot about
community development, and development of community, and I distinguish
strongly between those two phrases, because most community development
work is really about economic development, although maybe it's changing
a little bit now. But the development of community is really about the
social processes of learning to care about and love your neighbors. And
being committed to learning to get along with them. And so that was
probably the biggest challenge that we face, because in terms of an
intentional community, people are moving to the community with all of
the baggage that they have from mainstream society, and we were deeply
committed to a very diverse community. And so it was not only the
baggage from the mainstream, but it was the additional baggage that each
of us was raised with, in terms of our particular class, gender,
ethnicity, race. So it became -- and the one thing I would say, and I --
again if I'm repeating myself too much, you'll remind me that in spite
of all that diversity, we were all somewhat weird, because we asked that
people that came into our process would be committed to ecological and
cooperative living, and those two expressions had radically different
meanings to different people. And so it became, of course, communities,
like human beings, go through different phases of development.
-
COLLINGS
- And you had said that last time, the infancy, the adolescence, and how --
that you were going to talk about that this time. OK, so last time, you
did sort of go into how you funded the building and paid off the loans
and so forth. But let's just kind of go back, it's like the first day
that you have the key to this building.
-
ARKIN
- Oh. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- OK. You walk in, and then what happens?
-
ARKIN
- Oh, boy. Well, I should share with you that of course, we knew all the
neighbors that already lived here, and they were very relieved that we
finally closed on the building, because we kept telling them that it was
coming, it was coming, it was coming, and you know how real estate
closings go. And I, quite frankly -- I wish that I did, but quite
frankly, I don't remember the first day that we walked into the building
that we were owners; I just remember overall it being somewhat
overwhelming, those first few weeks, and I think that essentially, I
felt that the most important thing I needed to do was to find someone
that would function as a manager. And that knew how to do some repairs.
And because it was pretty --
-
COLLINGS
- What kind of repairs did it need?
-
ARKIN
- It was pretty awful. Well, for example, in one unit, when we opened the
door, and it was about two weeks before we actually got in every single
unit, and we opened the door, and there was overall about two inches of
water on the floor and a faucet in the kitchen that was still going the
size of a finger. And so that was pretty shocking. So the first thing we
did was turn the water off, and the people were living in very slum-like
conditions; I think I did talk last time about some of the families that
were living there.
-
COLLINGS
- You said that they were living in quite crowded conditions, and in fact,
you lowered their rent.
-
ARKIN
- Overall, within the first few months, we lowered rents about $25-$50,
depending on what the rent numbers were. And we had believed, and when I
say the "we" now, I'm talking -- essentially talking about my board, the
board of CRSP.
-
COLLINGS
- And what are their names?
-
ARKIN
- At that time? Oh, gosh, it was a larger board than it is now. But Ian
McIvaine, who was an architect, and he lived here in the community at
the time, and now lives and works with architectural firm with his wife,
who's also an architect, in Venice, and they have an architectural firm
called Tierra Sol y Mar. And very sustainability-oriented, I should add.
Jesse Mormon, who did not live here at the time but later moved into the
community, and he is a human rights attorney, and an immigration
attorney, which he and his partner, which is now his wife -- very
interesting, isn't it? -- run an immigration law firm in downtown Los
Angeles, and also started a non-profit organization involved in human
rights issues.Ross Moster, who never lived here, but was a wonderful resource person,
and is still kind of on our board; he was the founder of the Venice --
here in Venice, Los Angeles, food co-op, almost 30 years ago now. And he
was their volunteer general manager for almost all of that time, and
unfortunately, after he left, a few years after he left, the co-op
actually folded. But he actually moved to Vancouver and is active in
various things up there now. A wonderful person. And also, Ross was the
person who did, in the '70s, the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. And I happen
to believe it was the first People's Yellow Pages -- I'm sorry, not the
-- the People's Yellow Pages, which was all about social justice and
environmental things, and I believe it was the first People's Yellow
Pages in the country, or one of the first.We had at that time Didicus Ramos, who was a very local environmental
activist, and eventually went to planning school at UCLA. And then after
that, he was a planner working for one of the small east county cities
here in Los Angeles County, and very committed to recycling issues,
gardening issues, he had done a lot of aquaculture issues, and I believe
he now lives -- he moved away from LA about, oh, four or five years ago;
I believe he lives in Atlanta. We haven't kept in touch, but I have
reason to try to find him. Let me see who else we had at that time. Oh,
we had Dwayne, from the beginning, Dwayne Wyatt, who also came out of
UCLA planning school back in the early '80s, I believe, and he's a
planner for the city of Los Angeles, and he has been very, very active
in -- he created -- I believe he started the Black Planners Association
in the city of Los Angeles, he was very active in planning in South
Central Los Angeles.Let me see, I'm trying to think -- was that it? Didn't we have a few
more, maybe a few more? For awhile, [Lara Morrison], who was our
buildings manager here, was on our board, and at a certain point, I
think we all felt it was better not for her to have that conflict of
interest, being that she was an eco-villager that represented first
eco-village, and that we were going to be going into negotiations at
some point. And I'm trying to think of who else might have lived at one
point. Ian, Jesse, and I, and there was one more. So, at any rate, those
were the main folks on our board at that time. At this time, our board
is only four people, but we take a lot of advice from the intentional
community, and essentially, I would say that most of our proposals now
come from the intentional community, and that we consider them, and
they're oftentimes invited to or present at our board meetings now. And
especially with the move forward with the limited equity housing
cooperative and community land trust, so those are two things that we
are kind of -- the board is following very closely now, because
hopefully at the time that those transfers actually take place, it's
going to be really, really simple.So that's my vision and my hope, and in spite of the tremendous
contentiousness that there's been from time to time between -- or shall
we say tension between -- and sometimes contentiousness between certain
members of the community and the board and members of the community and
myself, and certain members of the community and my organization, things
at this time in May of 2007, are very mellow, and I think very loving
and mutually respectful all the way around. So that is, I think I
mentioned, into our kind of more mellow adolescent stage.
-
COLLINGS
- So what's the relationship between your organization and the board, then?
-
ARKIN
- My organization is called CRSP, C-R-S-P, Cooperative Resources and
Services Project. And its organizational structure is, because it's a
non-profit corporation, it has a board. And so the board I described is
the board of my organization, and they are my boss, so to speak, even
though --
-
COLLINGS
- Now, you don't have a board for eco-village as a separate entity, or --
-
ARKIN
- No. The Los Angeles Eco-Village is an unincorporated association that has
no formal legal structure at this point. However, in any eco-village,
there are many types of entities that will eventually, if not at the
start-up, will eventually be associated with the eco-village, from
unincorporated associations to various types of ad-hoc committees to
various types of formal committees to non-profit organizations to
for-profit businesses and so forth. And so at this time, I can name a
number of different kinds of organizations that are already associated
with LA Eco-Village. But LA Eco-Village itself has no formal legal
structure. However, it meets weekly, and it makes all kinds of decisions
about the buildings that are owned by CRSP; it essentially manages the
buildings that are owned by CRSP, and it essentially makes pretty much
all of the maintenance and repair decisions, it makes the rehab
decisions, it makes the decisions about who will move here and who will
not, who will be in our process. It certainly has a tremendous amount of
input about what will happen in the neighborhood. It led the -- there
was an eco-village that essentially led the movement to make Bimini
Place an official shared street that will -- I'm not sure if I mentioned
it or not.
-
COLLINGS
- No, no.
-
ARKIN
- One member, Joe Linton, who I believe was the person who essentially, on
behalf of the city, wrote a proposal to the MTA to make Bimini Place a
demonstration shared street, or traffic-calmed street. And it was -- the
MTA funded that proposal to the city of Los Angeles to the tune of
$250,000, and that was back in 1999 or 2000, Joe had organized a number
of community workshops, ultimately -- I shouldn't actually tell you,
maybe Joe will tell you this, but he might not, so you better get it
here. (laughter) And he organized a series of workshops, including a
workshop on the street, with like a canopy, it was hot, and all kinds of
display boards about what a shared street might look like, and of course
and fliered the whole neighborhood and invited neighbors to stop by and
input in, bilingually as well. And so that was some of the kind of work
that he did to prepare the proposal in the first place.And then when it was funded, it was funded as these kind of public
bureaucracy's work for the money to become available six or seven years
later. And so this is the year, and so -- or I should say last year,
2006, was when I think the city started to see, oh, this money is going
to be available, we better do this. But it was six or seven years later,
and so we kind of needed to go through workshops all over again for the
final design, working with the department, the Bureau of Street Services
and the Department of Transportation and the Council Office and the
Planning -- well, the Council Office; I would say those three entities
for sure, and the neighborhood. And so working with Council Office and
Bureau of Street Services, Department of Transportation, and Joe and a
couple of other eco-village volunteers organized a series of -- I
believe of three or four meetings that we inputted as to how we wanted
that design. And so the construction on the re-design of Bimini Place to
make it this hopefully beautiful kind of -- my vision curvy, but I'm not
so sure how curvy it's going to be with new trees and street furniture
and permeable paving and art and so forth, it's going to start,
theoretically, in December of 2007.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, fabulous
-
ARKIN
- And the wonderful thing about it is that it is going to be certainly much
more attractive than what we have now. The sad thing about it is that if
we haven't brought more of the housing in the neighborhood under
community control, it will radically gentrify --
-
COLLINGS
- Raise rents, yeah.
-
ARKIN
- -- the neighborhood.
-
COLLINGS
- I was thinking that.
-
ARKIN
- Thank you for reminding me; this is what we should be working on right
now, is getting at least one of the larger buildings down the block
under community control.
-
COLLINGS
- And how do you go about that?
-
ARKIN
- Well, there's an 18-unit building down the block that I haven't checked
in on for the past several months, but I know that it was a very
troubled building, and there was a lot of environmental and housing
department violations, and there were some legal issues with that
building, and I believe that the ownership was transferred to someone
else, who was, I believe, a friend of the original owner. And I do
believe that they do want to sell the building, and so I think that
what's really important for us, at this point, is to essentially work
with our larger constituency who has discretionary investment income and
be able to get an offer going for that building as quickly as we can
right now. And so I'm reminded of that, and it's on my to-do list to try
to do that, and we do know some folks that are interested.So, and then -- well, there are some other issues that we're concerned
about; the small school across the street, which I may or may not have
mentioned. We would like to see that whole property come under community
control for community development, and we do believe that the changing
demographics of the Los Angeles Unified School District justify that
letting go of that particular property for mixed-use development that
would include a small charter school in it. There's a lot of tension
now, between the school district and the charter school movement.
(laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, there is. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- You may have been reading about it in the LA Times. But since there's --
we're within -- I would say there's one -- there's a half a dozen
brand-new schools either already built or on the drawing boards for the
area that's walkable from here, and/or additions to existing elementary
schools. And so I happen to feel that we probably got enough classrooms
to cover the 200 students that currently go to this school. But, you
know, the school district is its own form of government, whether or not
we can work that politically or not, we don't know yet.
-
COLLINGS
- Absolutely. OK, well, let's go back. So you come into the building, and
how many -- (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- (laughter) Occupied by 23 -- is that where you were going?
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah.
-
ARKIN
- There were 23 units occupied, and out of the 40, the other 17 were
vacant, and all major slummy -- we thought that the reason that they had
been vacant was because that the rents were too high for the area.
-
COLLINGS
- 40 were vacant.
-
ARKIN
- No, no, no. The size of the building --
-
COLLINGS
- 14 were vacant.
-
ARKIN
- Well, 17.
-
COLLINGS
- 17, OK.
-
ARKIN
- 17 and 23 is 40.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, OK. 23, you said.
-
ARKIN
- So, yeah. 23 were occupied; 17 were vacant. We believed that the vacancy
rate was so high, not only because it was still the fallout from the
earthquake and the riots of '92 and '94 -- we bought the building in May
of '96 -- oh, goodness, we have our 11 year anniversary coming up this
month. But I think that what we realized, and it was a very, very
contentious negotiation, but I think what we realized eventually is that
units were not -- the vacancy rate was not that high because of the high
rents; the vacancy rate was that high because the units were so
dilapidated; they were so blighted; they were so slum-like that the
money that would be required to bring them up to code would not be worth
it to them, what they would have to put into the building up front would
not be worth it to them, in terms of this particular landlord, which so
many of the landlords, older absentee landlords of much older buildings
in neighborhoods like this, are in very slumlike conditions. And it was
before the systematic code enforcement unit of the LA Housing Department
was in effect, and so a lot of the code violations are being rapidly
corrected now, the past five or six years, seven. But this was still
before that time, and I think that's why it was in such slumlike
conditions. They were on their way to foreclosure, and this was a mom
and pop operation that owned a lot of property in Los Angeles, and were
probably a lot of other slum property that they probably were just
making lots of money on. They were attorneys; they were very, very --
father and son attorney, very savvy, and very nasty and untrusting. We
thought that we were actually working out a deal where they would be
able to get a very good tax break that would be more valuable than some
of the additional money. We could have foreclosed on them, and we chose
not to, because we thought we would give them this other kind of break,
but they didn't see that we were really trying to help them; they just
thought we were trying to rip them off, when if we really wanted to rip
them off, we could have foreclosed on them. It was a hard lesson for us
to learn. But we were still in that place of -- we don't really want to
put negative energy into anything we do; it was kind of like when I
moved from that apartment from that landlord that wanted to raise my --
"I don't want to be involved in the negative energy" kind of thing.
Well, we had a lot of hard lessons. (laughter) And we also had a policy
that we didn't ever want -- that we wanted to not only break the back of
real estate speculation in Los Angeles, and I say "we" -- I use --
-
COLLINGS
- That's the royal we, now.
-
ARKIN
- I learned from my community-mates over and over and over again,
particularly one, that -- "To use the word 'we' is presumptuous on your
part, Lois, and so would you please speak for yourself and not for me?"
(laughter) And so I have come to be very cautious of that word. But I
have learned many, many lessons, and I do think -- I believe that some
of my neighbors who have been in leadership positions with me during
these past 11 years or so have learned those lessons with me, and it's
that we that I speak of. But I certainly had a vision that we would
learn -- in eco-village, we would be a post-classist, post-racist,
post-litigious society, and that was my vision.And I felt that I wanted to select residents in the front end of the
eco-village formation that shared those values, that they too considered
themselves post-racist, post-classist, post-litigious -- I should say
post-genderist, post-sexist, kinds of people, that I had certainly done
a lot of work on my head on the baggage of my upbringing, which was
certainly just from a white upper-middle-class suburban Jewish family
that was certainly of the '40s and '50s and '60s that was certainly
racist, that was certainly sexist, that was certainly classist. And
believed that I had done tremendous amount of my own personal growth in
transforming myself away from those kinds of ways of being, and that was
a very hard lesson in the intentional community to be constantly
confronted personally by people, both persons of color and persons of
different classes, and white folks from middle-class backgrounds similar
-- perhaps similar to my own, perhaps not, with what others perceived as
my shortcomings in those areas. And that was very, very painful for me,
very painful kinds of things.And what I think I learned from that is as much as I believed that I had
transformed myself from those -ist, -isms, you never stop; you never
stop in this particularly society. That even if you personally think
that you have done that, the institutional issues are so pervasive, are
-- I mean, just the other day, I did something that I didn't even have
second thoughts of, and one of my neighbors, in a very nice way,
confronted me on it. And I thought, "Oh, wow. That was an elitist thing
that I did."
-
COLLINGS
- What was it?
-
ARKIN
- And I -- (laughter) we were at a party, it was actually a housewarming
party, and at a certain point -- we had had this kind of very intense
dialogue going on with that person's friends, who were not at all
connected to eco-village, other than they were friends with her, and
she's a relatively new resident to the neighborhood. And so at a certain
point, I was standing and talking to her, and I looked around the room,
and where we had all been one big circle at one time, now there were
little groups scattered all over the room. And in each little group of
two or three or four people, there was one eco-villager present in each
of those groups. And I said to her, "Oh, wow, look: there's one of us in
each of the groups of your friends." (laughter) And she looked at me
kind of weird, and she said -- I don't remember exactly what her words
were, but the implication was that that was a little bit elitist. Why
wouldn't it have been as, "Oh, isn't it nice how everyone's mixing
together?" She said that would have been better wording for me to hear
from you. And of course, I stopped and thought about it, and I thought
of course, she was absolutely right, and that was --
-
COLLINGS
- So you were sort of thinking of the eco-villagers as a sort of tribe, and
that they were like inseminating --
-
ARKIN
- Exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- -- these little groups.
-
ARKIN
- Exactly, because the whole group discussion had been very, very intense,
about a number of ecological and sustainability issues that we were
having with this group of people that were extraordinarily bright,
well-educated, up-to-date on so many things, but their first exposure to
eco-village, and their first exposure to their friend's new friends. And
I do believe that from that very intense full-circle discussion, they
might very well have gotten the impression of us being somewhat
cult-like, as we talked about our passions for lowering our impacts, and
our bicycle culture, and our feelings about cars and global greenhouse
gases, and our friendships and our community dinners and our community
meetings by consensus. And even though we are this extraordinarily
diverse community with no common spiritual or religious orientation,
which is oftentimes associated with cults, I could imagine how it could
-- as I thought about it later, I could imagine how it could be
perceived that way. Of course, I think too that -- sometimes we have
visitors from lots of cities and rural areas from all over the world.
Particularly I'm thinking of Sweden and Denmark and Germany. And when we
take them on tours and then have dialogue afterwards, it's like
everything that we do and that we're so proud of are kind of totally
woven into the fabric of their everyday life where they live. And so
it's nothing unusual; it's certainly not cult-like.And so -- but good things come out of a lot of these things. It's kind of
like, OK, I went away from that party and thought, oh, what would really
be a really good idea amongst -- here in eco-village, not only
eco-village, but our larger constituency that we email regularly to
several thousand, is to have drop-in dialogue groups for people that
want to learn to be effective, most effective agents of change in the
broader society, and how to engage people in those kinds of
conversations that don't alienate them. And all of us have friends and
families, and I regularly test out my ability to interact with the
mainstream in those ways on my own family, who are going to love me no
matter what. And I've seen changes, obviously, at this time in our
lives, we have tremendous support from the mainstream media in terms of
the criticalness of the changes that are going on in the planet. And I
think I mentioned before, 20 years ago we had a 20-year opening to try
to change things incrementally, and now we don't, and now we're even I
think reading in the mainstream press that we need to make the changes
deeply and quickly.
-
COLLINGS
- Which is unlikely to happen, so --
-
ARKIN
- Well, I don't know. I have done kind of a personal study of -- what kinds
of things motivate people in the mainstream to change quickly and
deeply? And I've come up with a list of about eight different things,
and I think that it's a matter of those of us who want to facilitate
that kind of change, it's learning how to address populations that are
susceptible to radical and deep changes from those particular
perspectives. And some of them -- is that something that's interesting
to you?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, please.
-
ARKIN
- Some of them are economics.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, that's central.
-
ARKIN
- So we have a Congress, potentially, and potentially a President in
another year and a half, potentially (laughter), that could introduce --
that could create legislation that change things very radically,
economically, in terms of taxing carbon, taxing the -- right now, we
subsidize the non-renewable resource explorations, and we don't
subsidize things that are renewable particularly heavily. So that could
change very quickly. Also, the carbon -- just a plain carbon tax on
things that we buy. There are -- so economics could also give tremendous
breaks to the things that are much more
ecologically/sustainability-oriented, like renewable energies, and
authentically green products and so forth. Also, congestion pricing, in
other countries they already have this technology, it's so easy, that
people actually pay for the use of our freeways and highways and so
forth, directly, rather than just through their taxes. So economically,
for me, it's a no-brainer; it can happen, and it can happen locally as
well as on a county and state level as well as federally, in terms of
the global movement for more sustainable ways of being. Fear is one way
that people change radically and deeply, but depending on what it is
that they're afraid of --
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, but not always rationally.
-
ARKIN
- Right. But health issues, for example. Fear for their children or their
grandchildren; fear for -- obviously, fear has been -- fear combined
with health issues has been a major way that we have radically reduced
our smoking and been able to pass our anti-smoking and secondhand smoke
laws all over the country now, and spreading throughout the world -- not
fast enough, from my perspective, when I go to visit other countries.
But still, fear and health issues. Art, all forms of art, have been a
way that people have changed radically, whether it's fiction or movie or
music or poetry or dance or theatre, visual arts, that has changed
people's lives, quickly and radically and deeply.
-
COLLINGS
- Absolutely.
-
ARKIN
- Charisma, whether it be the charisma of a leader or the charisma of a
non-profit organization, or a movie star -- I'm sure that Ed Begley,
Jr., and many people that have worked -- Daryl Hannah, I'm sure have
been a great inspiration to many people that might never have made the
changes, but they have made such incredible changes, and they speak so
eloquently of those, how to live on this planet, and they have a lot of
charisma. And then love, you fall in love with someone, or you love
someone who's your family member, and the condition of continuing in
those relationships sometimes is that you change or I leave. (laughter)
So that sometimes works too. Or that you want to please your loved one,
and then through the process of learning to please them, quickly and
deeply, you'll find, "Oh, wow, this is a better way of living."
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. "This actually works."
-
ARKIN
- "I'm actually raising the quality of my life and lowering my impact." So
-- and a few others.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. So you were talking a little bit about relations with the
community, and you mentioned that the board -- not the board, but the
members meet weekly and made decisions which they submit to the CRSP
board, makes recommendations.
-
ARKIN
- Well, I would say that there are actually very few that they submit to go
on to the CRSP board, because the board has essentially empowered them
to pretty much run the buildings. And if they are going to make major
architectural changes to the buildings, that is something that needs to
go -- minor architectural changes is not something we take to the board,
but if it's major, like they're going to want to start building a third
story to a two-story building, and then also, if it's a major expense,
that's something we want to take to the board. Like when we were
recarpeting all of our halls, or when we were putting solar power on the
building next door, these were major expenses that needed to be approved
by the board.The other thing that goes to the board that comes out of the community
sometimes is if they are proposing a new business of some sort, and want
to use the property in some way to support that business, such as the
Cultivating Sustainable Communities as a new non-profit organization --
I shouldn't say new, it's relatively new, maybe six or seven, eight, ten
years old now. But has a small staff now, and an executive director. And
they are a sister organization; they're an organization that is working
side-by-side with us to create the community land trust, and they wanted
to have an office in this building, and we're very aligned with our
non-profit sustainability-oriented purposes, and so that went to the
board, to give them a space for their office here in the building at a
very, very low rent.And the Bicycle Kitchen -- somehow, the Bicycle Kitchen that started here
now has a commercial space; I'm not sure that it ever actually got
permission, because it grew so organically and we all loved it so much,
including the board, half of whom lived here at the time -- or, not,
maybe not, but some of them.
-
COLLINGS
- So how are these meetings run? What are the -- I'm sorry.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah, but before I go into that, let me just say that from a legal
perspective, what the board of directors is responsible for in a
non-profit organization, according to state law, it is ultimately
financially responsible for the financial and legal aspects of the
corporation. And so anything that significantly affects finances or
legal stuff, we go to the board. We are considering an eviction, we go
to the board. And that is something that has happened from time to time,
unfortunately. And so my dream of being a non-litigious society was not
fully manifested, but for the most part, we are very fortunate, in that
we really haven't had much legal issues in all of these 27 years of our
corporation, very, very minor.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, that is very fortunately, actually.
-
ARKIN
- A few very justifiable evictions, and other than that, that's all.
Although from time to time, there certainly has been a covert threat,
but not any kind of overt.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, what kinds of things would cause people to be evicted, or to be
covertly threatened with eviction?
-
ARKIN
- Well, in one case, we had someone who moved here that was a charming,
absolutely charming, charming person, and a singular exhibit of
leadership, and we were very thrilled to have her come here. But it soon
became apparent, after three or four months, that she was here to pay
her rent for two or three months, and then she stopped paying her rent,
and then to be in a very ugly relationship with the organization while
we went through the two or three-month period of going through an
eviction, which she had apparently done with many other landlords, which
we unfortunately did not check out her references before she moved here,
and that was a very strong lesson. And so we did finally end up in
court, and the arrangements that were made with her on a regular basis
is that just prior to eviction, she negotiates to leave. And so this was
a very clever person.Another person that we evicted was someone who lived in the building when
we bought the building, and was obviously a mentally deranged person who
had been on the streets, and also did not pay her rent, and moved, as
with the prior person, had moved a boyfriend into her unit with her, and
this one had also -- or a male friend, anyway -- into her unit with her,
who was also somewhat weird in ways that we were not. And this mentally
challenged person, shall we say, or mentally disabled, or
psychologically ill person, was a person who would walk around, go walk
out on the middle of Vermont with a blanket wrapped around her in the
middle of the night, would knock on people's doors in the middle of the
night asking them for money, was very, very disconcerting to have that
person here. We worked diligently with resource organizations to get
help for her and her family, to get help for her and find alternative
housing for her where she could get more help. She continually refused,
and so we ultimately ended up evicting her. And even in the courtroom,
there was no -- she wasn't present, as I recall, but we tried to get the
judge to do a court order to -- I think, I'm not sure, to get her some
mental help, but -- I don't know what happened to her. So that sort of
thing.So what we did more recently, more recently -- last year, there were
still a few people here that were people that weren't a good fit, were
not participating, were quite contentious, that I certainly preferred
not to live here. And with respect to the community, because those
persons had very good friends that lived here, and even though -- what
we decided to do is, in conjunction with our board, who authorized it,
is to provide a no-fault separation option, so we sent it out to anyone
in the community, but essentially, it was -- what we hoped would happen
is that the people that were not really a good fit for living here would
pick up on it and take advantage of it.
-
COLLINGS
- And what would be an example of not being a good fit?
-
ARKIN
- Not being a good fit is, particularly after we created participation
requirements that we had never had, we had always told people that we
expected their participation --
-
COLLINGS
- Participation in what sense?
-
ARKIN
- In terms of coming to meetings regularly, functioning on committees,
coming to community dinners, to community special events, to community
retreats, that we had an expectation of all that, but we didn't make it
a requirement. And the community in the past few years has been working
on these kinds of things, and has eventually -- did make a requirement,
and asked members of the community to sign to a rental addendum about
certain kinds of ways of behaving in the community that had to do with
recycling and kind of things -- not having overnight guests forever, or
visitors without permission for more than two weeks, or something like
that.So -- not making major changes to your unit without going through the
building committee. All these kinds of things. Plus the participation
requirements, and so people had the option of signing onto that or not,
and several people did not sign onto the participation requirements that
were here intentionally, and several people that were here intentionally
did not even sign onto the rental agreement addendum that the community
had established through lots of hard work. And so those people
increasingly became people that were kind of inappropriate for living
here, because our purpose, at least my purpose, in starting the
eco-village, was to demonstrate that the processes are for creating a
healthy and sustainable community, and that we do that by our
participation in the community.And so that was a lesson learned for me, that that is something that I
believe in the beginning I should have required people to sign onto; I
did not essentially create a structure in the beginning, me and my
board, and those founding people that I worked with in the beginning, my
attitude was, and no one corrected me on it, and not because I think
they were trying to make a mess of things, but because none of us had
the consciousness as to what was essentially required, although I
certainly had the academic background in the development of intentional
communities, but not the experience. And so essentially, I think, in my
head, what I had was, "Oh, let's just get as many people here as we can
that are interested in more ecological and cooperative living patterns,
and when we get them all here, we'll figure out how to make it all
work." And that is something that I cannot advise people strongly enough
against doing. That is not workable, unless -- it's like winning the
lottery, that somehow that happens. (laughter)Founders of intentional communities, eco-villages, co-housing
communities, shared houses, even, need to have a strong vision as to
what it is that they want to do, and a mission statement that people
sign onto, and a structure for people to move into, and signed
agreements as to -- people agree to certain initial policies or rules
that you establish. And if it's like, if within your first year, you
need to volunteer ten hours a month in one of the following committees,
or two of the following five committees; you need to come to community
dinners at least once a month, we have them weekly; a community meeting
at least once a month, we have them weekly. And so forth, so they do
have this kind of a structure that people understand what kind of a
commitment they're making. And then you need to hold them accountable to
those commitments. So that's what I didn't do, and that's what the early
founders and the early members of the intentional community didn't do.The other major thing that we learned from is that I was -- I have always
been an idealist about democracy, and to me, the ultimate in grassroots
democracy is consensus decision-making. So of course, the way we will
develop this community is through consensus decision-making. And so
CRSP, the non-profit organization, always provided a variety of
workshops, forums, special events, speakers, on all manner of the
subjects that we're all about, but we never required eco-villagers to
attend any of those workshops. Not even the ones on consensus
decision-making. And so we had a decision-making process that people
were not very adept at, and didn't know how to use it. And yet they were
fully empowered at every week's community meeting, and so people might
come to a community meeting, and find, "Oh, there's this particular
issue on the table," and have no background in the issue, no background
in how the consensus process really works, but, oh, they were, "Oh, I
don't agree with that, so I'm blocking." Or, you know. So this became
the basis for tremendous contentiousness within the community, and
eventually was such that people in the community, as people in -- I
don't know if I've mentioned this before -- oftentimes people in condo
associations --
-
COLLINGS
- I was thinking about that when you were talking last time.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. Other kinds of non-profit and community organizations that maybe
are not particularly empowered in their families or in their work: "Oh,
here's a way to climb right up the power ladder and be in charge." And
so that's what people could do here, and they could then, if they were
not trained in the processes for healthy, sustainable, cooperative,
consensual community, could hold that community hostage to their wishes,
if they showed up to the meetings each week, they could -- you know, a
particular issue that they were passionate about, or in some cases,
there were people here that just really loved to fight; that's what got
their juices going. They loved a good battle. And so whatever was black
then was going to be white to them.
-
COLLINGS
- What were some of the issues that people would --
-
ARKIN
- Cats. (laughter) It's so funny, when I was at an international conference
last year on eco-villages in Tokyo, Japan -- I didn't mention that?
-
COLLINGS
- No.
-
ARKIN
- And I was on a panel, about half a dozen other people that were
eco-village founders around the world, and we had fabulous translators,
and double translators doing simultaneous translation and everything.
And so when it came time to wrap up the panel, and the moderator said,
"So, if you could say the one or two issues that have been the most
problematical in your community, what would you say they were?" And I
was the first one to speak, and so I -- just like I just did with you, I
said, "Cats." And it was so funny: there was silence, total silence in
the audience with two or three hundred people, and between the
translators. And they said, "Would you repeat?" And I said, "Cats." And
they looked at each other quizzically; they couldn't figure it out. And
I said, "Cats, as in an animal," -- finally, I said, "Cats, as in
animals with four legs." (laughter) So we didn't really have time to
discuss it very much, but that is an issue that has come up again and
again and again, regularly, every one or two years. When we acquired the
building, we had probably about a dozen cats, most of which were feral
cats, and there had been a woman who lived here before we bought the
building who had all these litters of cats and left them here when she
left, and then we had people who already lived here who were passionate
cat-lovers, and other people who came to our block to feed the feral
cats, and then people who moved in that were in love with cats, and
people that dropped off more cats here.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, no. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- And we had cats that pooped in the halls and urinated in the halls, and
we had cats that were in and our of people's units, or cats that
urinated in the units. And you know, once -- if you have wood floors,
once that gets into the wood, it's very, very difficult to get out. And
so it was a very contentious issue, and in spite of the fact that many
of us who did not want cats roaming the halls of our building and our
community spaces, because we made -- eventually made a wonderful
community room a few years after we bought the building, was very, very
hard once they were in -- and the cat lovers were passionate, totally
passionate. So it's interesting.So we say -- on the tours nowadays, we have about a 300-400 foot animal
enclosure; right now we have only one rabbit, but at certain times, we
had two rabbits, and half a dozen chickens, and we're getting half a
dozen chicken again soon, but it's been many years since we had them.
But we say, when we bring the tours to the animal enclosure, we say,
"And here we come to the issue of the animal versus the vegetable
people. The vegetable people think that this animal enclosure is a
really nice place for rabbits and chickens that are very social animals,
and that are always sticking very closely together, and that it's quite
large enough for them, maybe even for a little pygmy goat, or small pig,
and animals that all get along together." And so they're very pleased
with this. And then there are the animal people, who really think all of
the vegetables in our garden should be caged and the animals run free.
And so that kind of contentiousness ran wild for years after we started
the gardens. The one wonderful eco-villager here, who is one of our
founders, and just an extraordinary human being and a master gardener,
who was gardening initially, and then when cat poop was regularly found
in the gardens, decided he did not want to garden anymore. So we have
lost, over the years, have lost many years of him gardening. Now,
eventually, the community -- also the community has created -- I know
this all sounds very silly, but --
-
COLLINGS
- No, I mean, this is what really happens.
-
ARKIN
- [Diana Weave Christian], who wrote a fabulous book called Creating --
let's see, the name of the book, shame on me. Creating a Life Together:
Practical Tools for Starting Eco-Villages and Intentional Communities.
And she goes all over the country and gives workshops and talks on this
sort of thing, and she says, over and over again, the three most common
problems that people have in intentional communities are: pets, pets,
and -- (laughter) no, she doesn't actually say pets, pets, and pets, but
pets are one of her three main ones. I think pets and -- because they
have been so dominant in our community, and I forget what the other two
are, because apparently we haven't had a problem with them. Maybe money,
I'm not sure. And children, children -- pets, children, and something
else, but I forgot what the third one was. And there are some
eco-villages in various parts of the world, particularly in rural areas,
although it applies to urban as well, do not have any domesticated
animals such as cats or dogs, because of their tendency to put the
wildlife out of balance in the area. And so that's happened here; we
have some of the cats that live here who have been observed over and
over and over again attacking songbirds.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, yeah. That's what they do.
-
ARKIN
- And because so many people feed the cats, they don't even take care of
the mice. So from time to time -- although in the beginning when we
bought the building, that was one thing we never had, was mice. And
eventually we did from time to time have mice and have to use traps --
but not poisons. And so anyway, this has still been an ongoing problem.
Oh, the thing that's interesting is that over the years, the community
has actually created policy that said, "OK, there will be no more
indoor/outdoor cats. Exclusively indoor cats will be considered for
residency on a case-by-case basis." And so there are today probably a
half a dozen people that have exclusively indoor cats.But then there came someone along that adopted this stray cat from
someplace who was just the sweetest, most friendly cat, who ignored the
rule, and raised her cat as an indoor/outdoor cat. Obviously, lots of
eco-villagers came to love this cat very much, and so in spite of the
fact that she was in violation of the policy that the community had
consensed on, the cat remained. And this became a cat that -- again, as
sweet as it was, constantly attacking songbirds. So now that person has
moved and taken that cat with -- the person has taken the cat, so we are
very relieved, and now it's a new era, where at this point, we have no
more -- we have only one indoor/outdoor officially owned cats, and we
have three feral cats, which the community has agreed will be caught and
taken to shelters. And so we'll see how it goes, and if this will be the
end of the decade-plus-long era of cat contentiousness, or if it will
continue on and through the indefinite future.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, you said that she violated the policy. So do you have a process,
sort of an eviction process that is not a legal eviction process? You
know, obviously, if somebody doesn't pay their rent, there are clear
city -- yeah. And in fact, if they have signed something and they're not
allowed to have a cat and they do have a cat, that's also grounds. But
do you have something that is just sort of like a kind of community
based eviction process that doesn't actually go through the city?
-
ARKIN
- Yes. Well --
-
COLLINGS
- And how does that work?
-
ARKIN
- Well, we don't, because there's no such thing as such a --
-
COLLINGS
- But I mean, I'm talking about --
-
ARKIN
- (inaudible) city, through the legal system, yes.
-
COLLINGS
- I'm talking about like pressure that would be put to bear.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. Right. Well, this is something that the community has on its to-do
list, the intentional community meeting has on its to-do list, is to
actually develop an exit strategy for people who are not a good fit in
the community. Now, two things -- a couple of things are in process; I
started to say earlier, we had, last year, we had something we called a
no-fault separation agreement, and so that went out to the whole
community, but essentially it was targeted for people who were
non-participating, to give them an option. Because most of the people
who live here are fairly low-income. If you're fairly moderate to
middle-income, and it's not a fit for you, you can pretty much afford to
go move anyplace. But if you're a low, very low to low-income person,
and you need several thousand dollars to get a start in a new place, you
don't have that option unless it's coming to you from someplace. And so
what we decided to do with the approval of our board was to be able to
give people up to $1,500 in cash to move, if they wanted to take
advantage of the no-fault separation.
-
COLLINGS
- And what if they felt like there was no fault on their own and they
weren't interested in moving?
-
ARKIN
- Well, that's the exact idea of the no-fault separation: no fault. They're
not at fault, we're not at fault; it's just obviously, by this time --
and it's voluntary; you can take advantage of it or not. And because --
until the community actually comes up with an exit strategy that becomes
consensed-upon policy, we -- now, the other thing, of course --
-
COLLINGS
- Because through the city, you can't evict people just because they're not
liked, right?
-
ARKIN
- Well, the -- we have a very special arrangement with the city. And I
think there are probably several non-profits that do. Because we're
non-profits, and we applied for an exemption from rent-control, we did
actually receive an exemption from rent-control. And so we just with our
current residents, we were on a month-to-month rental agreement, and so
we legally could give anyone 30-day notice to leave.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, OK. That's how you do it.
-
ARKIN
- But we -- no, we don't do it. We believe that we are people that kind of
go by the spirit of the rent-control law, even if not by the letter of
it. And so we have never evicted anyone that wasn't for a legal reason,
not paying your rent. And even when we were threatening eviction, to let
them know that we needed to do this, because it was our fiduciary
responsibility to proceed with an eviction proceeding when they weren't
paying their rent, we, in most cases, never did go all the way to an
eviction, and did end up giving them the back rent that they -- did not
collect the back rent that they were responsible for. And so in the
no-fault separation, I think three people have taken advantage of it
now, and it not only included the back rent, anywhere between one and
five months of back rent, plus cash to go forward with. So it was very
-- much more generous than we needed to be with any of them, and had no
legal obligation to do any of it.And with some of our pre-existing neighbors that were underhoused, I
think I did mention that we helped them buy a house in one case, and
help them get a much better apartment in another. So we were -- I'd like
to think that we were a landlord with a conscience, and certainly
understands issues of social justice, and the issues of housing in Los
Angeles. And we have told some of our other neighbors that were
pre-existing neighbors who have been there for many, many, many years,
and we have told them, assuming that they have a good rental record with
us, we would be able to help them acquire a house, because we have those
kinds of resources within our networks of affordable housing. So, but so
far, we haven't, other than the one that I already mentioned; they're
not prepared to move at this point.But we do see ourselves moving forward with becoming an increasingly
car-free neighborhood, particularly when we're going to lose quite a few
parking spaces with the new street design. And I do believe there's a
way to help radically reduce the number of automobiles in the
neighborhood, and we need to be working on that right now, so that we
don't have the contentiousness that conceivably could come with the new
street design, but also, we don't provide -- for any of our intentional
neighbors, we provide no auto amenities; they have street parking only.
And for our pre-existing neighbors in the smaller building next door,
where all of them are driving households, they -- several of them
already had off-street parking when we bought the building, and so
little by little, we're going to essentially take back that off-street
parking and the garages that some of them have, that some of whom have
in their rental agreements and some of them who don't, who are just
using them and don't have them in their rental agreements. And so when
that happens, and we hope that we can do that in a very friendly,
non-contentious way, then that maybe a reason why they might decide that
they want to leave. And we would find a way to help them. So.
-
COLLINGS
- OK.
END OF Arkin.Lois.6.05.23.2007.mp3
1.7. Session 6 ( May 23, 2007)
-
- UCLA Oral History Program Lois Arkin Session 6, 5-23-2007
Arkin.Lois.6.05.23.2007.mp3
-
COLLINGS
- OK, good morning, Lois. It's May 23, 2007. Jane Collings interviewing
Lois Arkin in her home and office. And last time we discussed the
formation, founding/formation of eco-village, and we talked about the
community and how you keep it together, some of the ground rules and
structures for community organization and so forth. And I thought that
this time, we could talk a little bit about the philosophy of the
community, with regard to sustainable technology, your gray water system
that you have out in the back. Ideas that you might have regarding solar
-- I mean, one of the things that's been interesting is how developed
your community is, in terms of its social mores, and so I thought we
could just talk a little bit about the --
-
ARKIN
- -- more the physical aspect.
-
COLLINGS
- The physical aspects.
-
ARKIN
- And perhaps the economic as well.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah. So before we get into all of that, just as sort of a follow-up to
our last conversation, what aspects of your original vision have
changed? Now that you're sort of in it on the ground, and what have your
biggest surprises been? I mean, you wanted to sort of move forward with
an intentional community; you're now living in an intentional community.
Is it what you thought it would be?
-
ARKIN
- Well, let me just preface that with your introductory comment about me
being the one that keeps it all together. And for several years in the
beginning, I was that person, but for many years now, I haven't really
been. What I think I see myself as is a holder of the vision, and so
there's -- and the only person that has full continuity from the very
beginning to the present.
-
COLLINGS
- Institutional knowledge.
-
ARKIN
- Exactly. So, but believe me, my other 35-40 intentional neighbors have
really been the ones keeping it together for many years now, and I've
been saying for probably about five years that, oh, it's OK, I could die
tomorrow, and eco-village would go on. And that's, you know, I think I
might have mentioned before, that's the dream of most founders, is there
a life after you of what you founded. And so I'm very pleased about
that. But in terms of the physical aspects of eco-village, or the
ecological, I think I've said earlier, that an eco-village is
essentially the integration and the maximization of connections within
and between the physical or ecological and the social and the economic
systems of a neighborhood.And I would say that a lot of people do come here, and they go away, and
they -- "What really makes that an eco-village? I didn't see any gray
water system or any solar or any wind energy," or stuff like that. So
it's a big disappointment, and I always have to try to pull that out of
people who come on tours: what was a disappointment to you? What did you
like about it? What stayed with you, what did you learn from it? And
because a lot of things are hidden, and a lot of times, you don't see
them, you forget to mention them. So for example, on our smaller
building, the eight-unit building, very large units but a smaller number
of units adjacent to our larger 40-unit building, there are three units
which are about 1,000 square feet each that are completely solar. And so
they're net metered, which means, of course, that the meter runs
backwards, if there's enough sun to make it happen. And we have a vision
for this larger building to at least initially become -- to have a solar
hot water system. It actually did have a solar hot water system when we
bought the building in 1996, but that system was an old system that had
been installed in the early '80s, when that first started becoming
popular in the state administration, and there was all kinds of
extraordinary rebates for doing that, and very, very quickly in that
era, there were all of these scam hot water, solar hot water
contractors, and this building, the prior owners got one of those scam
contractors, so the system didn't really work. So eventually, we
dismantled that system and haven't replaced it yet, but we hope to do
that in the not-so-distance future. So that's what that is.But the things that we really focused and concentrated on, physically --
obviously, we talked about the first three years, and it was like on the
street and working with the kids, doing little micro-gardens and fruit
trees and so forth. And also eliminating cars from the lives of most of
the people who founded the village; all of us got rid of our cars. So
that was a major physical aspect of our lives. And then when we bought
our first building in 1996, the building was in such extraordinarily
poor condition, and such slumlike conditions, our thing was to
essentially get the units livable. And to do that, in as practical a
fashion as we could, using the policy in our rehabs and maintenance and
repairs of trying to use materials that are most local, most recycled,
least toxic and least polluting. Did I say all of this already?
-
COLLINGS
- Just, in the way that you just did, kind of like outlining it, we didn't
talk about any specific renovation projects.
-
ARKIN
- So this -- number one, did I talk about scraping the paint and wallpaper
off the unit walls? So all of the units, as happens oftentimes with
landlords in neighborhoods like this, whenever they're renovating them
for the next tenant, they just slap another coat of paint on. So our
work, initially, in rehabbing, was number one, turning off the water.
(laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, you talked about that. (laughter)
-
ARKIN
- I think I did. (laughter) But also, scraping 10 to 12 layers of wallpaper
off the units as we started to rehab them, and then, at that time in
1996, there was such a thing as no-VOC primers and paints and finishes,
but they were hard to find, and they were expensive. But we were
determined that we would use them, and so we hunted them down. And we
did find them, and so everything, the wallpaper and the paints were
scraped off down to the [lathe] and plaster -- the building was still
pretty free of drywall; it was lathe and plaster that we scraped it down
to, and then used these no-VOC primers and paints and finishes. What we
did with the floors, all the units were carpeted, and of course, what we
had been learning is that carpet, no matter how eco the carpet might be,
is fairly unhealthy. And so we decided we were not going to have carpet
in any of our units, and of course, the carpet in most units was in
terrible condition anyway.So we really struggled with what to do with our waste, what to do with
the carpet that we are taking up. So we ran free adds in The Recycler,
and eventually on Craig's List when it became popular, free ads, we
thought, oh, sound studios might -- you know, people that were making
home sound studios might take the carpeting, and then we learned that,
permaculturally, there are people that will use the carpeting on the
ground to make ponds and pools. And some of the underlayment of our
carpeting at that time was jute, it was an organic material; it was so
old there was no chemicals -- it was before the chemical age, so to
speak. So we started using some of that in the gardens, so that just
kind of decomposed naturally. And -- but there was a good deal of it
also that went to the landfill, but we did give away quite a bit, and we
composted some of it. But eventually, we got rid of pretty much all the
carpeting in the building that was in the units, including --
interestingly enough, our halls were bare when we bought the building,
floors were bare, and the sound, because that -- I'm not sure; I don't
remember whether we took out one floor, and one floor was bare or not,
but at any rate, the building is not very well-insulated, sound-wise,
and it was just like a drum every time someone walked down the hall.But we lived that way for about two years, and then we made a connection,
I don't remember exactly how, with the Palm Springs Convention Center,
and they had a contract with Interface Carpeting Company, and
incidentally, in yesterday or today's -- I think yesterday's New York
Times, there's a fabulous interview with Ray Anderson, who's the founder
of Interface, which is the most -- supposedly the most eco carpet
company, certainly in the US and possibly in the world, and certainly
the first in the US; I'm not sure about the rest of the world. But he's
a very, very strong advocate for sustainable development and sustainable
business processes. And so at any rate, the Palm Springs Convention
Center was getting rid of their old carpet tiles. These were like
18-inch squares that were made by Interface, and Interface was moving
toward the idea of leasing the carpet tiles, especially to commercial
users. And so at the end of life, they would take the carpet tiles back,
melt them down in a closed-loop system, and remanufacture them.
Obviously, the carpet tiles are still made out of chemicals, but closing
the industrial loop was an innovation that Interface was doing, and the
idea of leasing carpets -- and so at any rate, Palm Springs, they were
not taking back their initial tiles; they were happy to give them away.And so we had one of our board members who had a little pickup truck and
bring two or three loads back of these tiles, because they were very,
very heavy, and then we carpeted with those old ugly -- they were pretty
worn, I mean, not very attractive at all -- carpet tiles, and at least
that cut down on the sound for awhile. And we weren't in a position,
financially, at that time, to do anything major, in terms of carpeting
the halls. And then eventually, we did have a hall carpet committee that
worked for two years, coming up with a plan for the hall carpeting. It
was very, very ugly, what we had in there, and people were very
embarrassed about having -- I mean, they were more embarrassed when the
floors were bare and ugly, and now they were a little bit less
embarrassed, but it was still slummy-looking. And so eventually we got
these new Interface carpet tiles which you see now, which are really
quite attractive. And we got lots of extras, so if a couple get soiled,
you can replace them with the extras that we have.So we had this four-policy item, least polluting, least toxic, most
local, most recycled, for materials, but also, what I really wanted us
to have too was always a waste disposal plan. And sometimes it's easier
said than done, and just like the policies for how to -- least toxic,
least polluting, most local, most recycled -- if you have an emergency,
you have an emergency plumbing problem, and you got sewage coming out
here or there or whatever, sometimes you don't have the time to do the
research, and you just go to what's at the local hardware store as
quickly as you can. And so we did have plenty of that; I assure you, we
have some disgusting PVC in our building here and there. PVC is
disgusting because the manufacture process is polyvinyl chloride; the
manufacturing process is extremely toxic to people who work with it.
There's a fabulous documentary about this. And it also leeches, and I'm
sure that it's a very unhealthy thing, but hasn't been outlawed yet, but
hopefully soon. So that is what happened with building materials.We didn't do any more wallpaper, and we did uncover, interestingly,
several tags, that when the building was built in the 1920s, 1922 to be
exact, many of the tradespeople tagged the wall before painting it or
wallpapering it, and we uncovered a lot of that. Some of them we saved,
and it's kind of interesting; there's one in the community room from the
wallpaper hangers union, and of course, the union movement was just
coming up strong at that time, so it was very, very interesting to
discover those and save them. What was really interesting is how
beautiful the handwriting was of these people. Yes, those were the days.
Handwriting class; I can even remember in the '40s. So, at any rate,
then -- let me see, what else? Our -- so our ecological way of doing
things was more about conservation than it was about sexy technology. We
did have someone that lived with us, whom I believe I mentioned, T.H.
[Thomas Henry] Culhane, and if I talked about this at some length, I
don't want to talk about it again, but he lived off the grid unit that
he created. Did --?
-
COLLINGS
- You mentioned it, yeah.
-
ARKIN
- So he -- his philosophy was that anything -- and he was with us for about
five years, I'd say. And his philosophy was that anything that can be
done in a middle class home, suburban home, using conventional energy
systems of any kind, I can do in my 435 square foot apartment unit in
eco-village and demonstrate it to the world as the community tours would
go through. He was working on a PhD in international development at
UCLA, and was using LA Eco Village and his unit as a demonstration for
teaching himself how he would teach other people around the world. And
so he had a television and an answering machine and a freezer and a
fridge and a television set, every electronic device that you would
want, and he had what we called guerilla solar on the roof. I think I
did mention this. And then he also had a little living machine in his
bathtub, with aquatic plants and animals, and recirculating the 20
gallons.
-
COLLINGS
- No, you didn't mention that.
-
ARKIN
- OK, so he's got like 20 gallons in his bathtub, and a wonderful little
platform that he would stand on to take a -- it was actually a stone, a
nice big flat stone in his bathtub, and these little aquatic plants all
around and little animals in the water in the bathtub, and about 20
gallons that kept recirculating all day long, so he could take a shower
in the morning, and the water would recirculate, he could come home at
night, take another shower with clean water. But the filters --
eventually, I think he discovered something was not quite right in the
filtering system, so he needed to do more research.But that was kind of interesting, and -- oh, he was a musician; he had
all kinds of speakers and electric guitar, and all of that was hooked up
to his guerilla solar on the roof. And we always felt that, oh, if
anyone ever came and inspected our roof from the city, we'd be in deep
trouble. But they didn't, and he did that, and it was very -- he was a
wonderful spokesperson, and did several interviews; I think we had a
really good write-up in the Christian Science Monitor once, and in the
LA [Los Angeles] Times that really focused on him and what he was doing
here. So it was really good. And so that's where a lot of people that
have seen that publicity from around T.H.'s work believe that we're much
more advanced, technologically, than we actually are.Oh, he also had a composting toilet; he took out his regular toilet and
put in a homemade composting toilet in his bathroom, which was a
wonderful piece of technology, very, very simple technology, and I'm
hoping that we will have more people here in the future that want to do
that. No odors, nothing, and the human waste condenses radically within
a fairly short period of time, and within two years, it can easily be
used in your gardens. Unless it gets heated to a certain amount, I think
it's 167 degrees Fahrenheit, if it gets heated like that for something
like 64 or 72 hours, it can be used fairly quickly in the gardens. But
also, I happened to believe that if one is a vegetarian, the human waste
is a lot safer than if one is not. (laughter) But at any rate, those are
things that I'm sure that our technology will advance very, very quickly
as we rapidly are threatened with our local water supplies throughout
this country and all over the world, of course. And interestingly, my
mother, who lives in South Florida, says they are on extreme water
rationing right now, and there are police officers scouting the
neighborhoods, and anyone that's like watering their lawns when they
shouldn't be are getting $100 tickets. So I thought that was pretty
interesting; I don't know why we haven't done something like that here.
-
COLLINGS
- That was put in place at one point, but it was mostly ignored, and there
was no enforcement.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. So -- well, now with our neighborhood council system, maybe there
is a way of helping one another be better neighbors on behalf of all of
us. But at any rate, that was what happened on water. Some of us do
probably the simplest kind of gray water thing, and we don't all do it
all the time, I don't think, but some of us do it some of the time, in
terms of dumping our dishwater out the window. And I mean, I also use
tapwater right now; I have used filtered water in the past. But since
our tap water tests better than most purchased water, I guess I've been
using tap water. But I do know we have some lead in our pipes, but we've
been advised, if you run the water for 20 to 30 seconds, that will flush
the lead out, that if you haven't run your water for six or eight hours.
So when I put the water on in the morning, I do collect it and kind of
spill it outside. But now that may be contaminating the soil. But the
answer to pollution, when it comes to lead in the soil, is dilution. So
the more organic material you add, the less problem there is with lead.
And there isn't any significant lead take-up into plants, so that's
another issue that we actually researched and had one of the nations
topmost researchers actually come and give us a talk on that.But getting back to the water, so we little by little installed
water-saving devices throughout the building, in terms of our faucets
and our low-flush toilets. And so many of our toilets were the original
toilets that were installed in the '20s, and still working, amazingly.
Oh, the quality of the things that were built then, it was truly
amazing. But they were seven-gallon toilets, and so now I think we're
all down to 1.4, 1.5-gallon toilets and a lot of us don't flush
regularly. What's the old saying we used to have? -- "If it's yellow,
let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down." And so a lot of us don't
flush regularly, but then I have to tell you, there are trade-offs in
that sort of thing, and that is that if you let there be too much toilet
paper building, you're liable to plug up the drains. So be sure to flush
at least every three or four times, even if it's yellow. (laughter) So
at any rate, so that's essentially our water conservation.In terms of our gardens, we try to -- the garden committee tries to teach
people how to feel the earth to know whether it's watered. And we don't
have any drip irrigation system or anything like that, but we water, try
to water in the morning, and we're talking about watering vegetables, so
then we're buying less vegetables that have come 1,500 miles by truck.
So we tried to water in the morning or at dusk, but the way in which
it's important to find out whether something really needs to be watered
or not, number one is to keep everything well mulched, but number two is
to stick your finger in the ground, and if the earth falls apart like
sand, then you need to water, and then if it sticks together a little
bit, like just even a little bit, it's still doing OK. And so we tried
to, many of us do try to teach all of our neighbors involved in watering
that that's the way to determine whether the gardens need water or not,
regardless of just whether it's your turn or not to do it on the
watering schedule.And so that's where that -- but what we found overall -- well, then the
other -- let me just talk about the trash for a minute. We have two --
when we bought this building, the big building, we had two three-yard
trash bins, those huge things, and they got picked up twice a week, and
there were 23 units occupied. Within two years of buying -- less than
two years, I believe, of buying the building, immediately we changed it
to one pickup a week I think fairly shortly after we bought the
building, and we put out opportunities for people to recycle and to
compost, and tried to teach them how to do that. But years later, we
have only one pickup once a week, twice as many people, and we were
among the very first, even before we had a pilot program for multifamily
building recycling, we kind of commandeered the city's recycling bins
and recycled anyway on things, and -- but now the city officially has
multi-family recycling, and so we still have twice as many people, one
three-yard bin, pickup a week, and recycling of the metals and glass and
plastics and clean paper and cardboard, and then composting with pretty
major composting going on. And so -- and we think that -- several of our
pre-existing neighbors are doing all that along with our intentional
neighbors, but still and all even so, I look in that three-yard trash
bin, and sometimes my heart just sinks -- oh, who's doing that? Who's
putting that clean cardboard in the trash bin, or their veggie scraps?
So I think we still need to do more in-house education on that, really
seriously.So let me see, we have trash and we have -- oh, the point I want to make
on energy, both on gas and electrical, is that our bills -- we're
master-metered, so -- but our bills for gas and electric actually went
down for -- within a few years of buying the building. We had
increasingly more people and increasingly less gas and electrical usage.
Right now, we're not -- for awhile, we were tracking it every month, in
relationship to how many people were here and how many kilowatts and/or
therms and/or [hectares] of water used, and we haven't been tracking it
lately but we really need to do that and quantify that and see how we're
doing, and also give people incentives to do even better. 'Cause we do
talk the talk, but not all of us walk the walk 100%.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, does every unit have a mini-fridge like this one?
-
ARKIN
- OK, so that was another thing. When we bought our building, all of the
kitchens, most of which are maybe smaller than this one, had
conventional-sized appliances. 24 to 30-inch stoves, and 9 to 11 cubic
foot refrigerators -- you had to be an acrobat to get around the
kitchens. And so little by little, we have replaced almost all of the
appliances with more like hotel-sized appliances, particularly on the
fridges; they're one to four cubic feet. And still a few larger ones,
and the stoves mostly have gone to these 18-inch stoves -- I think
they're 18-inch, or 20, I'm not sure. And some people don't even have
stoves; for awhile we had some raw food people here, and they wanted
their stove removed, and then a few other people didn't want a stove at
all; they just wanted a microwave, which they provided their own. So
that is also one of the things that happened on energy. So we have
electrical -- now, we have visions of going photovoltaic, 100%, which is
also very, very expensive. But we also have the potential for rebates,
and we have the potential for seeking out funds that we could get,
particularly as a non-profit, to get reimbursed even if we went 100%
solar electric. So that is something that hopefully the community will
work on in the next few years.And the -- it would be wonderful to get off natural gas, which is
definitely a global greenhouse gas, and is certainly promoted by the gas
companies throughout the world as the most ecological thing you can do,
but it's truly a greenwash; it is better than coal, and -- but it's not
at all an ecological source of energy. So -- and then on water, I think
that we should also be doing a living machine, and really taking all
over our gray water, and eventually our black water as well, doing
composting toilets so we have a minimum of black water. And recycling
that in a decentralized neighborhood sewage system, which would be this
gorgeous beautiful greenhouse that takes the gray and black water and
feeds it through the biological living machine like T.H. had in his
bathtub, but on a much larger scale, but a much smaller scale than
Hyperion or our centralized sewage treatment systems. I think that in
the future, in times of disaster, that we really do need to have
decentralized as much as we can, water and energy. And so that's the
work, I think, of an eco-village, ultimately in an urban setting. So --
but we're not quite there yet, and remember, an eco-village is -- all
eco-villages in the industrial world are aspiring, or eco-villages in
process, rather than done deals. So, let me see. So we've covered, to a
certain extent, energy and water.
-
COLLINGS
- And do you have one hot water heater, or --?
-
ARKIN
- Yes, we do. And --
-
COLLINGS
- A central -- one central --
-
ARKIN
- We have one central one that is gas-driven, and it is much better than
the one that we inherited when we purchased our large building, but it
is still not what it could be when we go solar hot water, which is still
a combination of gas and solar, but you're going to use a lot less gas
in that kind of a situation.
-
COLLINGS
- When I was living in China in sort of a dormitory situation, the hot
water was only on after 6pm until -- I don't know when. It certainly
wasn't on in the morning, I can tell you that.
-
ARKIN
- I can imagine, yes. That's interesting, and I can imagine being fairly
common here in the states within a decade or sooner. So I think we're
going to have some very, very big issues around all of our energy, and
that --
-
COLLINGS
- But you have hot water, 24/7.
-
ARKIN
- We do have hot water 24/7. But we do have a very wonderful system of
circulating hot water, so you never have to wait for it to get hot when
you're at the opposite end of the building from where the hot water
heater is, because there are pipes -- the building was designed
amazingly well, and it was designed with these hot water circulating
pipes all the time, so you're never more than a few feet away from --
the hot water is right at your tap as soon as you turn it on, so that's
a tremendous savings in most places that don't have on-the-spot hot
water heaters, those other kind that heat it on demand there in the
bathroom or in the kitchen. So it's almost as good as that. And we have
a device, an electronic device that essentially measures how much water
is being used at any given time of the day, so it adjusts it so that
sometimes the heater is much lower, and other times it heats it up more,
depending on usage. So we did have that installed as an energy-saving
device.
-
COLLINGS
- And how are the units heated in the winter?
-
ARKIN
- We have complete illegal not-up-to-code heaters there, these old wall
heaters -- I guess some are more -- with holes in the walls, so there's
a little heater in each unit. I mean, I never in my -- since I've lived
here, I've never turned on my heater; I have it blocked by my desk, and
I'm not -- (laughter). And I think a lot of people here don't use
heaters; we don't like the nature of the heat. Some people can't live
without them, but some people just layer and don't want to have that
kind of heat. And I imagine there is a time when we might have the
dialogue within the community that lives in this building about, oh,
what should we do about heat? Should we just kind of give it up, as many
of us have already, and don't suffer any particular hardship? And
particularly with climate change coming upon us, winters are probably
going to be warmer, although they could be colder too. So that is
definitely a discussion we haven't had. So I would say probably about
half the people in the building use their heat at a minimum, even in the
wintertime. It is -- in a sense, it's indicative of the privileged
society that we are that our building codes require us in Southern
California to have the same kind of heating capacity as you might be
required to in a cold northern climate. And we have truly all year round
comfort, for the most part, if we just would layer a bit. So I expect
that will maybe change in the future, those building codes, and we won't
be so required to have these very energy-intensive systems.
-
COLLINGS
- OK, would you --
-
ARKIN
- And we have no, none of our intentional neighbors that I am aware of --
well, I think maybe one -- has air conditioning. And although it's not
written in our policies, I think most of us have always made an
assumption that people that moved here intentionally to live more
cooperative and more ecologically would never choose to have air
conditioning. I think it has been up for discussion once or twice, but I
don't think there's anyone here that's actually purchased an air
conditioning system for their window, but --
-
COLLINGS
- Would that be a problem if somebody did that?
-
ARKIN
- It would for me. (laughter) It would for me from a -- you know, what an
eco-village stands for.
-
COLLINGS
- So would that be something that would be brought to the group?
-
ARKIN
- I think that if I saw intentional eco-villagers starting to do that, or
even our pre-existing neighbors starting to do more of that, if they
didn't already have them when we bought the building, that I would want
to have that up for community discussion and what it means. And I do
know that there are some eco-villages in certain parts of the world that
have had major, major policy discussions on air conditioning, and
particularly where some -- in very hot, humid climates where there are
older people within the village that -- I don't know; I would just
really prefer us never to live with air conditioning. I prefer us to
think about how do we balance our lives with what nature is dealing us,
and/or work for the change that we want to see happen on the planet, and
air conditioning just isn't in my idea of what an eco-village should be
about. But there may be other opinions, and I'm just one of many these
days. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- OK. That's very interesting. Would you like to talk about the Bimini
Ecology Park?
-
ARKIN
- Yes, I would, but I would just say, regarding our energy and water use, I
would say that overall, just to sum up everything I said, our approach
to it has been conservation as distinct from just technology. And that I
want to just say that oftentimes when I read about things in the
mainstream around energy use and how we have to reduce it, and that we
should be buying Energy Star appliances. On a few occasions, I went on
the web to try to find some Energy Star appliances, particularly
refrigerators, and in the size that we were looking for, they don't even
have them listed on the Feds website. And so it's kind of like we were
so under the radar in what we're doing here. And then of course, Energy
Star air conditioners and Energy Star, you know, humongous electric
ovens and stoves. And it's kind of like, OK, people are surprised that
they don't see more kind of technology, ecological technology, but
compared to a mainstream -- actually, we had an intern here once who did
a study between a comparable 40-unit mainstream apartment and ours.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, interesting.
-
COLLINGS
- And I think we did substantially better than the mainstream apartment
building. But we are so far under the radar in a lot of ways. For
example, significantly less than half of our intentional neighbors don't
own automobiles, we talked about that. So all of these things put us, as
a demonstration, a radically different way of living in our city. So on
to the Bimini Ecology Park. Well, I have to tell you. There was this
remarkable man whose name was Jeff Carr, and who will be a fabulous oral
interview for UCLA. He was in Washington, DC for a few years but he's
returning to LA, so I want to connect you with him. And he was the
executive director of the Bresee Foundation, and if you have been on
their website, bresee.org -- B-R-E-S-E-E dot O-R-G, and they are a
multipurpose center targeting youth and their families, and they have a
neighborhood healthcare clinic -- I'm probably -- OK, they have a
neighborhood healthcare clinic that provides free medical care for
low-income people; they have a neighborhood computer center, for $5 a
year, anyone can belong and go in there during regular working hours and
have access to their top-of-the-line computers and website and email
address. So if you're low-income and you don't own a computer and you
live in the neighborhood, it's a great thing.They also have a computer classroom where they teach youth and adults
too, I think, computer software stuff and so forth. They have a big
youth center there, and homework mentoring rooms, and all kinds of
volunteers that come in, and all kinds of workshops. For example, an
eco-villager provided them with a bicycle repair workshop, and also with
-- another eco-villager did a nutrition class with them. So it's a
really wonderful thing. And they have a multipurpose room where we can
have neighborhood meetings down there and so forth.So their executive director, Jeff Carr, had a vision that he wanted a
place outside where the kids could hang out. So he decided that he would
get the street closed down adjacent to the building and make it into a
park. And so, because we worked very closely informally, we soon learned
about that, and I soon said to Jeff, "But Jeff, Jeff --" all he was
thinking about a park, a park with just some grass and trees. And I
said, "Oh, but Jeff, this could be an ecological park." And Jeff didn't
really, at that time, I don't think he knew very much about ecological.
His social justice IQ was like way up in the top ranking in the whole
country, but his ecological IQ left something to be desired. And so I
just kind of kept pounding on him, and finally, I connected him with a
non-profit ecological architect, and they came up with this idea of --
where the park is the convergence of two streets. Both of those streets
are on a slight angle, maybe five degrees, so all the stormwater goes
down to where the street was where the park was going to go. We're
talking about a 20,000-square-foot park, which as parks go, is a very
small-sized park. One block long, adjacent to the building, to the youth
center building.So they came up with this idea that there would be like a little
stormdrain under the curb, so not only the stormwater, but the water
that comes from car washing and all the other things that happen on the
street with liquid would go through this stormdrain and then there would
be a metal catch basin on the other side of the stormdrain that would
catch the trash. And then there was this beautiful 500-foot winding
streambed that would go out the stormdrain, that had a stormdrain on the
other end of it. And meantime, in that streambed that was depressed,
maybe three to four feet, it was layered with sand and gravel. And so if
when the water came in through this stormdrain, it would percolate back
down to the water table through the sand and gravel and be cleaned on
the way down of its toxins and particulate matter. And if there was a
big storm that was rushing -- oh, and incidentally, it was not only
layered with sand and gravel, but all these different kinds of grasses.
Initially, all of those grasses were also natives. So if there was a big
storm, the water would rush through the winding streambed and go out the
other end, what was left over that didn't percolate down would go out
the other end in a more cleaned condition.And what happened was that every time we had a big rain, the Department
of Public Works that was involved in the funding of it would come and --
no, I guess they got some money for it later -- would come and measure,
take some samples of the incoming water and the outgoing water, and be
able to statistically show the difference in the quality of the outgoing
water going through that stream bed. And this became a demonstration
ecology park, but that was one of the most main feature that made it a
Bimini Slough Ecology Park. Other features of the park are a tot lot,
little playground for children, with a very thick and soft recycled
rubber surface, and then there are also many, many native plants planted
there in the park, including some sycamores, I think, and any number of
other natives. And they have a list, a plaque, that lists a lot of the
native plants of the area. So that's kind of really neat about it.Now, the history of why it's named the Bimini Slough, S-L-O-U-G-H, which
actually means a seasonal wetland, is because there was a seasonal
wetland called the Bimini Slough that used to wend its way through our
neighborhood and out to the Ballona watershed; we are in the Ballona
watershed as distinct from the LA River watershed. And one of my very
knowledgeable LA Eco-Village neighbors, Joe Linton, whom I think you've
met, who wrote a book about this, informed us at dinner just last Sunday
night as to why we are the Ballona watershed as distinct from the LA
watershed. And that is, when you go downtown from here, and downtown is
on -- you go up kind of after Alvarado [Street], there's several hilly
streets, and the final entrance into downtown is down a very kind of
steep hill over Wilshire [Blvd.] and 6th [Street] and 4th [Street] and
so forth. And it's like, oh, so that was the dividing thing where the LA
watershed went -- the water that came down from the mountains on the
downtown side went into that watershed, and then on our side, I think
this side of Alvarado, approximately, went into the Ballona watershed.
So it was very, very interesting.And so the Bimini Slough was one of the many, many streams or little
seasonal wetlands that came out of the mountains, and so we wanted to
honor that essentially geological history of our neighborhood. And
there's -- if you go on the internet, and you google Bimini Slough,
B-I-M-I-N-I, Bimini Slough, Bimini Baths, Bimini Place, Los Angeles, a
lot of this history will come up, and some wonderful pictures too. So
that's the -- oh, in the park, too, they also have -- they have used a
lot of urbanite -- urbanite is broken-up concrete -- to create benches.
Teenagers love to hang out on -- sit around and talk to each other on
these benches, so there are these little paths with -- fairly narrow
paths with these benches facing one another so kids can sit there and
have a conversation.So it's a very nice little park, and there is a grassy area, and there's
benches; of course, I would have preferred to have had community
projects to make the benches and so forth, but we're beginning to have
dialogue with Bresee leadership and staff as to how to involve the kids
and kind of re-owning the park and re-learning about the park and what
it does, and what kinds of trees could be there; we think we could get
the kids involved in planting and stewarding a lot of fruit trees in
that park, and other kinds of things that are currently there. There's a
few, but they're all guava trees, and we'd like a little bit more
biodiversity.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you have a very vigorous program of public information; you have a
lot of speakers coming through.
-
ARKIN
- Yes, we do.
-
COLLINGS
- Would you care to introduce that program?
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. Remember when, in the very beginning, I talked about some my
pre-history in the Songwriters Organization. And we used to have -- so
much of what I initially learned, how to run a non-profit organization
as a resource center came from that experience. And we had regular
speakers there, so when I started CRSP, I thought, oh, we're going to
have regular speakers too. And so even before we started eco-village, we
always had speakers come, and we did workshops, sponsored workshops and
so forth. And -- but essentially, I would say during the two or
three-year period when eco-village was getting started, that went way,
way downhill. We still had some speakers, but they were few and far
between, because my energies were just so preoccupied with the
neighborhood and raising money for the buildings and so forth. But now
that things are running fairly smoothly here, and I've been able to
focus more, and we had a board retreat of the CRSP board I think about
three years ago now, we should be having them at least every two years,
hopefully every one, but we haven't in awhile. And we talked about, as
the buildings transition, both buildings, which I think we talked a
little bit about them transition to both a community land trust and a
limited equity co-op, and if we didn't, we will --
-
COLLINGS
- No, we did.
-
ARKIN
- OK. As the buildings transition, and certainly the past few years, as I
have not been at the pinnacle of the decision-making function, that
really is for pretty much 98% of the decisions today, the community, the
pro-active members of the community make those decisions. I'm just the
bookkeeper. And I am anxious to get rid of that in a responsible way,
and hopefully soon. But -- oh, wait. What was I going to say?
-
COLLINGS
- We were talking about the speakers program.
-
ARKIN
- Oh, yes. So at the retreat, we talked about what will be the -- how will
CRSP really focus its energies as the transition is complete. And it was
very enthusiastic and unanimous that we -- with all that we've learned,
and particularly with our, at that time, the relationships between CRSP
and the community were not ideal, but they have been increasingly ideal
the past year and a half or so. And assuming that they're pretty ideal,
we would want to stay here in eco-village and share what we have
learned, and particularly share it in a way that includes so many of the
eco-villagers that have been the key people that have been learning with
me, as a representative of CRSP and some of our other constituents, and
that we are the people that could actually help a lot of other
neighborhoods get started in the central city, particularly, but
certainly in the suburbs as well, and outlying areas, especially if
they're urban, that we can teach neighborhoods how to transition to more
sustainable neighborhoods. And so we named it, in that retreat three
years ago, we named it the Institute for Urban Eco-Villages, and we
began, probably about a year and a half ago, just calling ourselves that
on our website, and putting out our notices of our speakers.Now, how are all these speakers coming to us? Well, a couple of different
ways. One way is chutzpah. (laughter) You decide you really want to have
someone that has information you want to have, and you just call them up
and tell them. And at this point in our history, if you're at all
involved in anything sustainable, in terms of sustainable community
almost anywhere in the world, you've heard of Los Angeles Eco-Village.
And if not, you know, "Oh, just google us, and a lot of things will come
up." And -- but in many, many cases -- in fact, I would say -- in such a
significant amount of cases, it's that the speaker is coming through LA,
and is interested in either staying in eco-village or -- "I'm going to
be in the area; would you like me to give a talk?"And so I mean, that
happened just last week. A couple months ago, this person from the
Worldwatch Institute, Eric Assadourian, who's a research associate there
and does the vital signs each year for the past several years, which is
the vital signs on the ecosystems of the planet. And the Worldwatch
Institute is just one of the most amazing, incredible organizations in
the world, and it was started by Lester Brown, who is certainly one of
my mentors, even though I've never -- well, I guess I met him once, but
even in the '70s, I remember when he first started the Worldwatch
Institute, I was so impressed with the information that was coming out
of that organization about the planet's ecosystems. And so when Eric
called, he said to me, "I'm coming to the West Coast, and I'll be in the
Bay Area, and I'd like to come down to Los Angeles to see what you guys
are doing, because I want to include you in next year's Vital Signs,
which is going to be on sustainable communities." Oh, I was so honored
and so thrilled. So we had this conversation, and said, "Well, gee,
Eric, would you be willing to give a little talk while you're here?" And
he would have been thrilled to give a little talk while he was here, and
so we did have him give a little talk last week, and it was delightful,
and he came and spent two days with us, and talking with several
eco-villagers, and I think we will be in next year's Worldwatch Vital
Signs Report on sustainable communities.
-
COLLINGS
- And are the talks mainly attended by the eco-villagers, or do you have
community members who --
-
ARKIN
- We have a mailing list of about 2,500 names now. In the olden days of
CRSP, I think it used to be up to 5,000, and we used to do it hard copy
with labels. But now it's email, just strictly email, and I think we
have about 2,500, primarily in the greater Los Angeles area, but
reaching throughout the world, the country and the world. And so we send
out a calendar about once a month as to what's coming up, and many of
the speakers are people that come through that we draw here, because
they're part of our eco-village network, and/or part of our permaculture
network. Bill Mullison, who started permaculture, we sponsored him in a
talk here in the mid-'90s. And we used to frequently pull in many, many
organizations to co-sponsor these talks with us, so I think at that time
we had TreePeople, we had the talk up at TreePeople. And I guess --
yeah, that's right, so we had a long-standing relationship with
TreePeople and Andy [Lipkis], I think I mentioned him. Albert Bates, for
example, who was one of the co-founders of the Global Eco-Village
Network, and runs the Eco-Village Training Center at the farm in
Tennessee, has been here a few times and done public talks and
workshops. Diana Leafe Christian, who is with the Fellowship for
Intentional Communities and has a wonderful reputation for the talks and
workshops that she gives is a very close colleague of mine, and she's
the editor of Communities Magazine, which is the national trade
publication for intentional communities and eco-villages. And so I'm her
editor of one of the regular columns in that magazine, called the
Eco-Village Living Column. So we've worked fairly closely for well over
a decade now.So we've had her -- this summer will be the third year that we've had her
come and give a two-day workshop on how to start an eco-village. And
Pacifica, KPFK, has been the media sponsor of her workshops; I'm not
sure whether we're going to have them do that again this year or not,
we're going to see. And so there's any -- now, one of the most -- so,
oh, in answer to your question about, oh, who's the audience? So it's
generally a combination. I would say for the most part, we get about a
dozen eco-villagers to almost any of our public talks. And at least to
our full-day, two-day workshops, generally five or six eco-villagers
that come to those. We've had two-day workshops on -- well, we've also
had a number of retreats specifically for eco-villages. And in some
cases where we've had those retreats, we've had a Friday night public
talk that would be open to both the public and the eco-village.
Sometimes we'd do mainstream publicity in addition to our calendar, our
website, and our email calendar, and sometimes we don't, depending on
how glamorous, quote-unquote, the speaker is, as to whether we want to
do that, and how much space we have or what our venue is. Generally, the
venue has been here at eco-village, but sometimes we'll have something
on an outlying venue that can accommodate more people. So that's how
that all happened.So now in relationship to that Institute for Urban Eco-villages, we want
to -- and I think it was also starting in our retreat three years ago,
one of my colleagues, whose name was Liora Adler, and her now-husband
Andy Langsford from United Kingdom, started something called Gaia
University, which is kind of a hands-on, interactive learning
institution, which now is an accredited B.A. or M.A. or PhD degree, but
it's on-site learning, or it's distance learning, it's interactive
learning; the focuses is on sustainable community, and it is really a
remarkable program that's growing very rapidly right now. And our
Institute for Urban Eco-Villages eventually will merge with that
program. And another -- and I'm going to be meeting with Liora next week
in Brazil at the Eco-Village Network of the Americas meeting that I'm
headed for. And then also, there's another educational component called
Gaia Education, which was designed and developed by the Global
Eco-Village Network, and a committee of about a dozen people from around
the world that created this 12-week curriculum that can actually be
inserted into neighborhood associations, local colleges and
universities, or local non-profit organizations. So that's another
academic program that we expect that we will be incorporating into the
Institute. And that's a developed curriculum that people can learn about
by going online, and -- I think they have -- both Gaia University has
its own website, gaiauniversity.org, and gaiaeducation -- also dot org,
I believe. So it's very interesting. So lots of opportunities for
learning much more about sustainable living in any area, urban, rural,
or suburban.
-
COLLINGS
- So would you like to say something about what's going on now with your
relationship with the LA USD? You're trying to turn the street up here
into a walk street, but there's an obstacle to that.
-
ARKIN
- Well, actually not. The shared street -- we did talk -- did we do kind of
an overview --
-
COLLINGS
- Well, you said that you wanted to turn this -- you wanted to block off
the ending, and you wanted to turn this into a car-free --
-
ARKIN
- Right. Did we talk about our shared street program with the MTA
[Metropolitan Transit Authority]? And the city and the -- OK, so let me
do that, and then if sound familiar, you can interrupt me. In 1999, Joe
Linton, and maybe he'll tell you this, had this great idea -- I think he
was working for the city at that time, and kind of knew how to do things
from the inside. But he had this great idea to apply for -- to become
one of the MTA, Metropolitan Transportation Authorities' annual call for
projects. Each year, the MTA had so much money to spend on whatever
proposals came through that they approved of that would enhance public
transit, so to speak. And lo and behold, he as a volunteer for
eco-village, but actually because it was in our interest for him to do
this, but on behalf of the city, because I don't think that a private,
non-profit could apply for these projects at the time, I think it had to
be like a public agency that was in the MTA's district, but I'm not
sure.And so he wrote a proposal to the MTA on behalf of the city, and it was
funded. But the funding was projected for seven or eight years in the
future. And when Joe did that, he did remarkable, wonderful things; he
coordinated workshops that we had in the street, because it was pretty
hard to get a lot of our neighbors to come to a meeting to give input,
but if we set up a workshop in the street, then as the neighbors were
walking or driving by, "What's happening?" "Oh, come on, look at this."
What I call front-porch planning: you go and sit on people's front
porch, or make yourself so obvious, and ask them questions; they'll give
you the input that you really want to have. And so it was fun. Now, it
was -- this year and next year that those funds had to be spent, or we
were going to lose them. And that whole process needed to be updated. It
needed, from seven years ago, a lot of the people have changed, a lot of
our consciousness has changed about what could go into a street.So it was called a shared streets project, and it was also informed by
something -- by the specific plan for the area called the SNAP, or the
Station Neighborhood Area Plan, I think it has another name too, which
is a specific plan that we put a lot of energy into when it was formed
also, including, I believe, the Mayor Riordan at that time actually
vetoed the plan when it was passed by the Planning Commission and even
the -- oh, passed by the Planning Commission and the City Council. And
Joe helped us organize -- I think it was -- organize to actually go and
lobby every City Councilperson to override the mayor's veto to get that
specific plan in place; it was very, very innovative, in terms of things
like shared streets and live/work spaces, and developer money going into
public parks, really a very innovate plan that actually the city
planners Lynn Harper won an American Planning Association award for the
innovation of that plan.So at any rate, getting back to it, so it was seven or eight years since
the money was approved and now had to be spent, so we had a series of
workshops or meetings this year to bring the plan up to date, meeting
with the Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Street Services for
the City of Los Angeles, and the Council Office and the community groups
that we could get represented to come to those meetings. And so, that
said, the money is being spent by all this planning in city agencies,
and we've had several weeks of city people out here taking various
measurements and so forth, and the construction of the street will begin
at the -- in December, the new shared street, and it will have park-like
features and trees, the kinds of trees that we want to have, and it will
be just phase one of what some of us envision as ultimately becoming a
car-free street. And but that will be a later phase.Now, the school district, the small school that is situated within
eco-village called White House Place Primary Center, people there,
parents and teachers and principals, were invited to those planning
meetings. I don't think anyone ever showed up. And we are going to be
making it more -- perhaps more difficult for school drop-offs at the
school there, and hopefully, eventually, we'll prohibit any school
drop-offs on the main streets of eco-village. But we have a vision. You
know, whenever you're trying to solve a problem of your own, and you
make problems for someone else, you need to try to figure out how to
solve their problems too, because otherwise, you're going to have a war,
right?So some of us have a vision for making the main street that the school
backs up on, and also has entrances too, which is 1st Street, which is a
main street here, intersecting Vermont. But because there are schools on
both sides of First Street between Vermont and Virgil -- we think it
would be fabulous to make that a slow street also, and we think we could
get support from the city for doing that, and then all the school
drop-offs could easily be there instead of on the eco-village streets
that are headed toward going car-free.This morning, while you waited for our interview, I was, and Lara, my
neighbor and colleague here, were out schmoozing with some of the
honchos from the school district that are planning to demolish the very
deteriorated four-plex across the street that eco-village started in,
and was my home for 12 years, and before that, in the building next door
for 12 years, before they built that little school there. And I imagine
that we did talk about the tremendous battle, or the struggle that we
had launched to save that four-plex, and how closely we had worked with
the school. And so we gave them a little bit of that history, but most
importantly, we informed them that we are very serious about the
sycamore tree in the back that's 100 years old, and sycamores are now a
protected species in the city of Los Angeles. You cannot take them down
without a special permit. And I hope that the school district is not
exempt from those rules and regulations, because they are exempt from so
many rules and regulations that are local; they operate as their own
legislative jurisdiction, and very often do not work with other local
agencies. So I am concerned about that, and I kind of wanted them to
know a little bit -- because I think the one person we were talking to
is a fairly high-ranking official, general design management.And so one senior project manager, very interesting, wanted them to get
the feeling about what happened here in 1997, where this was the subject
of an international struggle to save that corner and the gardens that
the children were learning so well in. And that let's do things with
some community input here, and the LA USD is going through some changes,
and I'm not about to radically badmouth that amazing bureaucracy,
amazing in so many ways, and I leave it some space for doing some
transformation; there are some fabulous, wonderful, extraordinary people
that work within that district. But we have not had a relationship with
the school in some years, and I think that it's time to rethink that
relationship.And so I was out there this morning talking about, well, isn't there
someone now within the school district that specializes in joint uses?
And might we get involved with that person? And then I said, you know,
the best thing that could be done right now, especially as you're having
some problems with funding for the multi-purpose auditorium you want to
build for $2.5 million, which we stressed to him very strongly, that we
can help you do what you want to do for under $50,000, which of course
they didn't believe, but of course, I know that if it's a multi-purpose
auditorium, you want a shelter where the kids can eat, and a place where
they can perform and so forth. It's a very easy thing to make a
protected outdoor space that does all the things you want to do to make
a $50,000 indoor space. (laughter) But also, we have lots of other
sources of money, so work with us, and we'll help you get to those other
sources. Don't work with us and we won't. That was the covert -- kind of
the covert threat. But also, don't go messing with that 100-year-old
sycamore tree. Covert threat.The big thing, I think, for, sometimes, people to understand, without --
that there is a covert threat, that it's better to work with your
potential partners than to go to war. And that -- don't go making
problems for us; we don't want to make problems for you anymore. Let's
figure out a way to work together. And so I suggested to this person,
who is a very senior project manager consultant for the design and
technical support, that we should be having a community charrette, which
is a community design workshop that includes the parents and the
teachers and the principal and the various organizations within the
neighborhood. "Include us, and we will solve your problems, I promise
you. Exclude us, and we will be a problem for you." I didn't say that,
but that's what I meant. So at any rate, that's what was happening out
there.
-
COLLINGS
- And speaking of the street outside, I see that you also have a lot of
posters up regarding the MTA proposed fee. What is this?
-
ARKIN
- Well, there are several eco-villagers that are members of a bus riders
union, and the bus riders union is taking the tactic of this impending
vote tomorrow among the metro board that they are going to radically
raise the fares for buses, and so the bus riders union, of course, has
the taken the tactic, not only is this unfair and unjust, but it is also
racist. And so that's the signs that they put out. Some of us don't
really necessarily feel that it's intentionally racist, although it's
certainly unintentionally -- maybe it is intentional, but maybe it's
not. But it does end up being certainly very, very oppressive to both
people who are very low-income, or low-income, or even moderate-income,
and it also ends up being -- you know, if you're radically going to
increase the fare, you're going to have a lot more people driving that
right now are moving toward not driving.
-
COLLINGS
- Fares are already pretty high, I think.
-
ARKIN
- Yeah. And so we have a lot of ideas. Lara is going to the meeting in the
morning, and she has some wonderful things that she's going to present,
I believe things like congestion pricing. In many other cities now all
over the world, cities that really do not want so much congestion or so
much pollution, have little devices, I think they're quite inexpensive,
that fit on all of the cars, and when you use the highways and roadways,
it ticks away, and you get charged. So people that use them the most are
getting charged the most for the use of them. So I think that's a great
idea. Another thing is called "parking cash out." We'd have -- what we
know is that people frequently are driving around, particularly in our
congested areas, with street parking as distinct from parking lots and
parking structures, looking for a street parking place, because they're
so cheap. And sometimes, they're driving around for 20 minutes looking
for a space, waiting for a space, for a free or low-cost meter. And if
you started making those street meters, everything really expensive for
cars to park, then we would maybe eliminate all that driving around
looking for a cheap or free parking space. We need to charge for
parking, and we need to use that parking not for more car amenities, but
for more transit amenities. And so things like that. We are -- if the
price of the metro goes up, we are going to increase people driving; we
are going to have worse air; it is going to be a terrible, terrible
thing, and it's going to be on the backs of lower-income people, both in
terms of our lungs and in terms of our pocketbook.So yeah, so we've put up a lot of signs about being sure to get to the
MTA meeting tomorrow, and although I did read yesterday that they are
going to actually have to vote tomorrow, so they're not really even
going to have time to consider all the input that they're going to get
tomorrow, which frequently happens. Now, this also is something that
happened yesterday with the war. Was it yesterday? I don't know; I can't
-- you know that the Democrats voted to fund the war?
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COLLINGS
- I know, they caved.
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ARKIN
- It's like, oh, my God. I couldn't even believe it. And so I think that
things are going to get much more serious on the streets, and that we
are going to see much more civil unrest, and if we haven't completely
lost our democracy by the end of the Bush Administration, and, you know
-- it's just terrifying what's going on right now. And I -- you know,
it's like people are kind of throwing up their arms in disbelief that we
put so much energy into electing this Democratic Congress, so many of us
who are not even Democratics, we're Greens, or refuses to state, or
Independents, or -- and we put all of our energy into that, and now look
what's going on. Let's recoup and see where we're going from here, and I
predict that if things continue as they are, there is going to be,
sadly, maybe our demonstrations are not necessarily going to be as
peaceful as they have been. And that saddens me to no end. And of course
then we've had this extraordinary conference of mayors that met in New
York City for two days just last week. Did you see anything about it in
the papers?
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COLLINGS
- No, you have to get that coverage from the radio almost exclusively.
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ARKIN
- It was amazing to me; I think it was a worldwide convergence of mayors of
large cities, and our mayor was there, and there's nothing in the local
papers about it. And it was just astounding me, and they were there
specifically to talk about issues of climate change and what they were
doing.
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COLLINGS
- Right, and the impact of large cities on -- yeah.
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ARKIN
- Yeah. And so being that the -- Mayor Villaraigosa is one of the top dogs
in the MTA, I think it's going to be very interesting to see where he
goes with this tomorrow. And is he, too, going to cave, to people that
are still so attached to their cars, and so brushing the hands with
money of the elected officials. It's going to be very interesting to see
how that goes tomorrow.
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COLLINGS
- Yeah, it's a very significant vote. So I think we've come to the end of
our interview. Would you like to offer a prediction for the future of
eco-village?
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ARKIN
- Well, I'll offer a prediction for the future of eco-villages. I think
that I am quite pessimistic of the future of the ecosystems on the
planet. I think we're hearing over and over again from the science
community that even if we do everything that we're supposed to, in terms
of cutting greenhouse gases and radically reducing our carbon footprints
that it's going to take 50 to 100 years to undo the damage that we've
already put in process. And so there are certain cities that are -- you
know, for the rich, I'm going to Sao Paulo this week, and I'm reading up
on Sao Paolo; I understand they have the largest helicopter fleet in the
world, because that's how the rich people get around now, to avoid the
--
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COLLINGS
- Crime, right.
-
ARKIN
- No, to avoid the traffic and the pollution. And so -- well, maybe crime
too, but. So there you have increasingly the division between the rich
and the poor. At any rate, so I'm not optimistic about our future, but I
am hopeful. And hope springs from things like the breakup of the Soviet
Union, and how quickly that happened, or how seemingly quickly that
happened. Hope springs from things like the destruction of the Wall in
Germany, and how quickly that seemed to have happened. So that's where
my hope comes, that there can be very deep and very rapid change, even
if those major changes I just mentioned were long-term in the making.
Well, our changes are also a long-term in the making, going back to
Rachel Carson's work of 1970, and all of the environmental stuff that
has followed behind that. And yet it seems that we've been going forward
in our knowledge, but it seems like we've been going backwards.But also, what we have today going on the planet are hundreds of
thousands of grassroots organizations doing things like we're doing here
in a major variety of areas of social justice and environmental change.
And many of those hundreds of thousands of organizations are not
connected. But now, they are beginning, through the incredible
information technology that we have access to, and particularly a new
website that I just discovered last week called wiserearth.org,
developed by Paul Hawken, and the organization that he's working with,
where we have an easy way of connecting. And so this grassroots activity
is now -- has such lives of its own, and are doing so much extraordinary
work, that we are finding out and connecting with one another
increasingly, and that as Paul Hawken said, for the first time in
history, in our known history, changes are coming from the grassroots
rather from the hierarchies of power, of conventional power. And so I
have every hope that we will continue, and that I do believe that there
are going to be major catastrophes, from both social unrest and
ecological disaster.And I believe that the social unrest will be a direct outgrowth of the
ecological disaster such as Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami, and that
we can expect much worse, that those are only previews of things to
come. And so how will we live, in terms of who's left and what's left?
And to me, the hope of eco-villages is what gives me hope, and that we
are a global movement, and in terms of the work I'm doing this week to
prepare for the meeting in Brazil, which I haven't done much work on in
the past few years, I am finding that when I google "eco-village" on
Google, almost a half a million items come up. On Yahoo, 350,000 items.
YouTube, lots. MySpace, lots more. If I -- because I'm responsible for
eco-village networking in the western US, and so when I started googling
each state with the word eco-village, every state of the 24 states that
I'm working with -- and just thousands, no state less than 25,000 items
came up. And so I am absolutely overwhelmed with what's going on in the
eco-village movement.And what we know from the global eco-village movement is that there's
something like 20,000 eco-villages worldwide, but I'm going to tell you,
I'd say that may be what's on the ground and operating, but there's
probably 50 times that number that are in process, or groups of people
starting to come together that want to make eco-villages, and/or
retrofit their neighborhoods, or move -- or essentially move into
community and create more cooperative ecological living patterns. And I
think the mainstream evidence of that is in the co-housing movement,
which is rapidly accelerating now; people want to live more cooperative
lives, and they want to live more ecological lives. They don't
necessarily know what all that entails, but I think the interest is out
there. There is an increasing convergence of the environment movement
with the voluntary simplicity movement and the cooperative living
movement. And it's that convergence that gives me a lot of hope, and
that convergence, I think, grows out of a lot of these hundreds of
thousands of grassroots organizations that -- "Oh, wow." A lot of the
groups might say, "Oh, it's so hard for us to get together, because
you're on that end of town and you're on that end of town and gas prices
are going up," and so they're starting to maybe move together and be
these extraordinary groups that are giving us all hope.
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COLLINGS
- Sounds wonderful.