Mountain Views News          Saturday, June 26, 2010

10 

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, June 26, 2010

My Turn


HAIL Hamilton

STUART TOLCHIN 

Do We Need Grandparents Day?

Mountain Views

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Publisher/ Editor

Susan Henderson

City Editor

Dean Lee 

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Patricia Colonello

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Allison Kirkham

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Richard Garcia

Photography

Jacqueline Truong

Lina Johnson

Contributors

Teresa Baxter

Pat Birdsall

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Stuart Tolchin

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Hail Hamilton 

Rich Johnson

Chris Bertrand

Mary Carney

La Quetta Shamblee

Glenn Lambdin

Greg Wellborn

Ralph McKnight

Trish Collins

Pat Ostrye

Editorial Cartoonist

Ann Cleaves

Webmaster

John Aveny 


Today, only 6 percent of 
American households 
have grandparents living 
in the same home as their 
grandchildren. Sixty years 
ago, when I was growing 
up, it seemed that every 
home had a grandmother 
living together with the mother and father 
and children. This is not to say that any 
of us were very happy about the situation. 
Grandparents were weird. They had strange 
accents and stared out the window and 
didn’t seem to care about the things that the 
rest of us thought were important. I had 
one grandmother who looked up funerals 
in the papers and would take the bus to 
attend the funerals of people she didn’t even 
know. The strange thing is that really no 
one else in the family though this behavior 
peculiar. I guess everyone else understood 
that attending these events allowed her to 
experience some happiness at still being 
alive. In addition to that the funerals she 
attended probably consisted of people who 
spoke one of the languages she understood 
and gave her some comfort. I really don’t 
know because English was not one of the 
languages she mastered and I really never 
had many conversations with her. I just 
thought she was weird.

 Still I valued my grandmother’s 
presence and still can taste her cabbage 
borsht and sweet and sour meatballs. 
Although today I am attempting to follow a 
vegan diet (and am doing a pretty good job 
of it) I will sample the cabbage soup when 
it is offered in a restaurant ignoring its beef 
broth and small pieces of meat. The reddish 
color of the soup together with its unique 
aroma immediately brings to mind my 
grandmother. As I think of her I think of my 
father weeping after her death. It was the only 
time I saw my father cry and the memory of 
he and my grandmother provide my with a 
kind of centering and connectedness which 
I feel is a very vital part of me. Thinking 
about it now I think that the close contact 
with my grandmothers (for a while both 
my paternal and maternal grandmothers 
lived with our family) developed within me 
a kind of understanding and compassion 
that does not resonate within today’s more 
isolated and egocentric children.

 Along this line, my regular readers (I 
like imagining such people exist) will recall 
that a couple of months ago a picture of my 
father appeared next to my article. This 
picture was there to celebrate the hundred 
year anniversary of his birth. I showed 
this picture to my daughter and nieces 
and nephews and they just did not seem 
very interested. I understand that really 
these now fortyish adults have little or no 
remembrances of the man and other than 
looking for resemblances they were just 
not very interested. Really I had a similar 
reaction when I was shown pictures of 
deceased relatives who had been killed at 
Babba Yar. (I never know what information 
I should presume readers have. Babba Yar 
was a big hole that was dug by the Germans 
at the end of World War II. The whole 
was dug in the Ukraine, at a time when 
it was clear the Germany was losing the 
war. Nevertheless, with the assistance of 
Ukrainian Gentiles, hundreds or thousands 
of Jews were rounded up and forced to 
dig the huge hole after which they were 
machine-gunned and fell to their death in 
the big hole.)

 What more is there to say? There 
is information about the past that we need 
to know even if we would rather remain 
ignorant. Often this information comes 
from just being in a kind of constant contact 
with our older relatives and without this 
knowledge of our own histories we are 
sometimes unable to understand even 
our own emotions. Perhaps generational 
isolation has something to do with the fact 
residents of the United States consume two-
thirds of the world’s anti-depressant drugs. 
Really, I believe that the lack of appreciation 
and knowledge about the sacrifices 
and ordeals faced by our forbearers has 
something to do with the difficulties we are 
facing today. Our parents, grand parents, 
and great grand parents did what they 
could to make it possible for us to have the 
opportunity to lead better lives. Statistics 
now show that in places like California 
many people are not making the best of 
these opportunities. Do you know that in 
California more money is spent on prisons 
than on Universities? 

 Something is radically wrong. 
Perhaps a step in the right direction would 
be for all of us to stop focusing on the 
satisfaction of minor needs such as being 
constantly entertained and trying to live to be 
a hundred without losing our hair and teeth. 
We are probably going to fail at that anyway 
and perhaps our lives would be better spent 
trying to understand something else like the 
nature of our own existence through contact 
with our own family histories.. Maybe a way 
to start is to begin celebrating Grandparents 
day a few times a year.

Environmentalists 
NOT To Blame

 Greg Welborn’s article, “Gulf Disaster Compliment of 
Environmentalists “ (June 19), was an unabashed rehash 
of recent attempts--by conservatives like Sarah Palin, Rush 
Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity--to shift blame from BP to 
environmentalist for the Gulf Oil Spill. It is no secret that 
I seldom agree with Greg’s views, but that doesn’t mean 
I don’t respect his opinions. It’s just that in this case he is 
dead wrong--AGAIN! 

 Greg begins by asking the right question: “Why are we 
drilling at 5,000 feet in the first place?” But concludes with 
the wrong answer.

 “Because environmentalists have succeeded in closing 
off the Arctic circle area of Alaska (a 30-year moratorium 
in place) and have rendered the Pacific and nearly all the 
Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production, we have to drill 
deep, at a 1,000 feet or more, and after that have to drill really 
deep, at 5,000 feet.”

 Blaming environmentalists for the Gulf Oil Spill--because 
of a perceived “radical unrealistic environmental ideology”-
-is like charging the victim of a crime with the crime itself 
because of their idealistic utopian views on law enforcement.

 The real reason for the disaster is GREED! Money is made 
by oil production not environmental protection. The result 
is that for the past 40 years there has been no serious effort 
by BP and other oil companies to develop new, better technologies 
to clean up oil spills when they happen. 

 In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, Congressman Ed 
Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the 
top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which 
they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had 
spent “$39 billion to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the 
average investment in research and development for safety, 
accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20 
million a year.”

 ““Part of the reason is there have been so few big spills,” 
BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told NBC’s Tom 
Costello on the TODAY show. “The events haven’t driven 
the technology change that’s out there,” Suttles said. “I think 
this event probably will.”

 What is Suttles Talking about? Where has he been the 
last few years? I can think of a several recent big oil spills 
involving BP. In fact, the company has been at the center of 
two of the nation’s worst oil and gas–related disasters in the 
last five years. 

 In March 2005, a massive explosion ripped through a 
tower at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers 
and injuring 170 others. Investigators later determined that 
the company had ignored its own protocols on operating the 
tower, which was filled with gasoline, and that a warning 
system had been disabled.

 In August 2006, a year and a half after the refinery 
explosion, technicians discovered that some 4,800 barrels of 
oil had spread into the Alaskan snow through a tiny hole 
in the company’s pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. BP had been 
warned to check the pipeline in 2002, but didn’t. It was later 
determined that BP had ignored opportunities to prevent 
the spill and that “draconian” cost-saving measures had led 
to shortcuts in its operation.

 Other problems followed. There were more spills in Alaska. 
And BP was charged with manipulating the market price of 
propane. In that case, it settled with the U.S. Department of 
Justice and agreed to pay more than $300 million in fines.

 Time will tell whether the accident that killed 11 workers 
and sent the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig – a 
$500 million platform as wide as a football field – floating to 
the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was simply an accident or 
something else.

 This much is clear: In the year before the accident, BP 
once again aggressively cut costs. A reorganization stripped 
5,000 jobs from its payroll, saving BP more than $4 billion 
in operating costs, according to Fadel Gheit, an investment 
analyst for Oppenheimer.

 On April 27, as the U.S. Coast Guard worked with BP 
engineers to guide remote control submarines nearly a 
mile underwater in a futile effort to close a shut-off valve, 
BP told investors that its quarterly earnings were up more 
than 100 percent over the last year, beating expectations by 
a large margin and topping a decade of outperforming its 
competition.

 Environmentalists are not to blame for the current Gulf 
Oil Spill. Greed--corporate greed--is the real culprit. This is 
a disaster that has been years in the making and is solely the 
fault of BP. It is their irresponsible greed-driven actions that 
caused the blowout; and it is their irresponsible greed-driven 
half-measures since the spill began that have prolonged the 
disaster.

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RICH Johnson

Name Your Poison


I owe a profound apology to the hard-fisted drinkers of Sierra Madre 
for never focusing a column in their direction. You see, I was never one 
to imbibe in drinks made from hard liquor (that is, of course, except 
for the “slurpee-esque” drinks such as margaritas and pina coladas.) 
So, please forgive me. I devote this column to those of you who may 
not be able to read it due to temporary blurred vision.

Bloody Mary… is a combination of tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce and vodka. Not 
surprisingly it is called by the “single most popular mixed drink,” by the Smirnoff Vodka 
Company. Credit is given to Fernand Petiot a bartender in a famous Parisian bar named 
Harry’s. Credit is also taken by a Harry’s regular aka Ernest Hemingway. The drink was 
named after Mary Tudor, queen of England in the early 1500’s who earned the nickname 
by not letting a week go by without terminating the life of at least one protestant (How’s 
that for a reality show idea?)

Martini… a short drink made with vermouth and gin, has many potential namesakes. 
One is the Martini & Rossi Company, which was making vermouth in the 1820s. Another 
candidate was Friedrich von Martini, a Swiss firearms inventor who supplied the British 
with Martini-Henry rifles in 1871. The drink in question was said to have had, “the kick 
of a Martini.” Replace the lemon twist or green olive in a martinia with a pearl onion and 
you have a “Gibson” named after illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. 

Margarita… a combination of tequila, lime juice and Triple Sec has multiple claimants. 
L.A. bartender named Daniel Negrete says he invented the drink circa 1936 in Mexico after 
a girlfriend named…Margarita. Well, a gal named…Margarita Sames claims ownership 
having it invented for her in an Acapulco bar circa 1950.

Harvey Wallbanger… created with orange juice, vodka, and Galliano can thank a 1950’s 
surfer dude for inspiring it. After a particularly poor performance in the curl, he started 
downing this concoction created by legendary Sunset Strip mixologist Duke Antone.

Tom Collins… made with gin, citrus juice, soda water and sugar (leave out the sugar and 
you call it a “Rickey”) Created during the Civil War by a John Collins, the name was 
changed because a sweeter gin named “Old Tom” replaced the original dry gin. 

Don’t confuse the “Rickey” with the “Mickey or Mickey Finn.” That drink was named after 
a shady San Francisco bartender who in the 1890’s would drug drunk sailors for a variety 
of reasons. 

Grog… was named after a British admiral, Edward Vernon who, in the mid 1700’s watered 
down liquor during long voyages. He wore a coat made out of fabric named grogram 
earning him the nickname, “Old Grog.” By the way, George Washington’s estate, Mount 
Vernon, is named after “Old Grog.” 

Booze… is named after a Colonel Booze, a 19th century (that’s the 1800s for you sober guys 
and gals) distiller who sold liquor in bottles shaped like log cabins. 

Hooch… is credited to the Klondike Gold Rush days when a tribe of Alaskan Indians 
known as the Hoochinoo brewed a mixture of yeast, flour, and molasses. It was so popular 
with miners, that in 1898, the local newspaper called it that “joy-dispensing hooch.”

So, if you see me in the bar at Café 322 and enjoyed this column, belly up next to me sailor 
and buy me my favorite libation, a Shirley Temple. That would be 7-up and grenadine. 
And, di you know until 1933, seven-up went under the name “Lithiated Lemon.” Kinda 
snappy huh?


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Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com