We all know that my big-dreaming, veggie-bodied quadriplegic uncle, Gordon Zahler, helped cut his post-production teeth supplying overbearing, background music to Ed Wood Jr.’s universally condemned/cult beloved science fiction “thriller” Plan Nine From Outer Space. But two years earlier, just around the time he probably would’ve died from intestinal complications had it not been for a daring, experimental surgery pioneered by the U.S. Veterans’ Administration, Gordon also rounded up the music for Wood’s short, Final Curtain. It was always hard to know what became of this earlier movie, but recently there’s been a turbine of publicity that it was an aborted T.V. pilot. Hold your space aliens: a discovered copy was aired at the Sundance Film Festival!
EndearingNew York Times story about the uncovered footage:
” … The journey was a personal one for Mr. Insalaco. As he explained in an interview before the pilot was screened, he had been introduced to Wood’s films through his great-uncle, the eccentric actor Paul Marco. Mr. Marco played Patrolman Kelton, a k a Kelton the Cop, in several Wood films, including the notoriously awful “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” to which Mr. Marco had taken Mr. Insalaco when he was 6. Their relationship grew after Mr. Insalaco’s father died; so did Mr. Insalaco’s affection for Wood. “There’s something that resonates with audiences, and certainly with me,” said Mr. Insalaco, now 37 and an executive producer at Clear Channel Radio’s KFI in Los Angeles. “I’ve watched them over and over again, and I was interested in them since I was a teenager.” Mr. Marco, who had mentioned “Final Curtain” to Mr. Insalaco numerous times, died in 2006 at 78. Two weeks later Mr. Insalaco found a letter on Mr. Marco’s nightstand detailing Wood’s plans for the pilot. It was to be Part 1 of a television series called “Portraits of Terror,” Wood wrote in the letter, and a print had already been struck. But where was it? …”
So much to think about here I need Criswell for brain de-pressurizing. But if that pilot had gone ahead and Gordon’s kept his numb feet tangled in Wood’s big-hearted, Mickey Mouse productions, he never would’ve gone on to network-status, bigger movies and real adventure. Check out what he did. And remember the book about him, Wheeling the Deal. Two years later, incidentally, Gordon contributed to his third Ed Wood Jr. feature, 1959′s “Night of the Ghouls”. After that, Gordon chased Wood around for the dough he owed him, and Wood went cliche Hollywood deadbeat, blaming the bankruptcy of his production company for his losses.
* I was very heartened to learn that the Motion Picture & Television Fund, which became a financial lifeline for my grandmother and paralyzed uncle after the family breadwinner (my grandfather, Hollywood composer/musician Lee Zahler) died in 1947 from the stress of Gordon’s accident, is now on firmer footing after some tumultuous years. It’s even accepting new nursing home patients. An old editor of Gordon’s, the subject of my first book, Wheeling the Deal, just moved in there, in fact. The MPTF is too glorious, too historic and important to wither away as an institution for industry people in their golden years. It might be one of showbiz’s best inventions, this idea of taking care of your own when others cannot or by choice. Glad the Home has new leadership and semi-open doors again. From the L.A. Times blog:
“Three years after a controversial decision to close Hollywood’s best known nursing home, the Motion Picture & Television Fund has reversed course and said it would immediately begin admitting new residents to the Woodland Hills facility. The decision marks a victory for residents and their families who waged a highly public campaign to fight the fund’s decision in January 2009. Many residents accused the charity of losing sight of its mission to take care of entertainment industry workers and refused to leave, hiring an attorney to block evictions. At the time, the fund’s board members said they had no choice because its facilities were losing millions of dollars and threatening the charity with bankruptcy. On Wednesday, however, MPTF officials said the nursing home’s finances had improved under new management, enough at least to justify admitting residents …”
* California’s multi-decade experiment with redevelopment as a blight-busting tool went kaput with Jerry Brown’s budget recently, and of course the endings across the state would be messy. Unfinished projects, developers left hanging, city halls unable to scrounge up bridge financing for work underway, affordable-housing advocates cursing a blue streak. Why should it be any different than the way urban renewal was regarded during its existence? At L.A. City Hall, where the disenguousness over community redevelopment smelled as rank as some of those Occupy protestors weeks after their last showers, bureaucratic amputation is the theme. From the L.A. Times:
“The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to relinquish control of its redevelopment agency, leaving the task of shutting down hundreds of millions of dollars in activities to some other branch of government. On a 9-3 vote, the council decided to in effect walk away from the agency and 192 employees …”
Bonus: link to some of my many stories about redevelopment in L.A. You’ll find corporate welfare, good intentions gone awry, bond debt, empty anchor developments, nepotism, boosterism and a Santa’s Village. (Note some of these links will be refreshed soon.) Bonus No. 2: When urban renewal-less pols attack: link.
* Wait, Ontario residents want to manage the airport within their own borders? The sheer audacity of it … only contracts next to its ironclad logic. Imagine a city managing its skies. In Southern California, aviation is a political contrivance puppeteered by L.A. City Hall.
L.A. Times poll on the issue. My old story on Ontario International.
As you may have heard between news segments about the supposedly healing U.S. economy and those clever mullahs who run nuclearizing Iran, the primate that once occupied a prime cage in Americans’ hearts has kicked the bucket at the grizzled, pinch-me age of 80. Being a conspiratorial land, some have their doubts, because animals like this typically have much shorter lifespans, let alone ones that have lived that Hollywood high life. From USA Today:
” … “You do understand that this chimpanzee could not possibly have been in these Tarzan films,” says R.D. Rosen, author of a 2008 Washington Post article titled “Lie of the Jungle,” which debunked the authenticity of a different chimpanzee that had been dubbed the original Cheetah. “The idea that this Cheetah could have appeared in these films, had this long career, and now had this wonderful retirement is ridiculous.” …”
We may never know if there were a whole slew of Cheetahs, one replacing the other and not chattering about it in their special language or to the local paparrazi. But this is not just some cute entertainment industry trivia to me. My grandfather, Lee Zahler, was a virtual music machine who composed, orchestrated and played on hundreds of Hollywood movies from the 1920s to his death in the late-1940s. I can’t locate “Tarzan” among his many credits on IMDB, but that doesn’t mean that much because for some industry folks, it’s notoriously incomplete. Check out the projects and serials that Lee did have his hands in (Westerns, war pictures, adventure, crime potboilers) and you’ll see my point. Future posts will focus on the shimmering variety of young superstars he came in contact with in those knock-em-out production days.
Now comes Lee’s son, Gordon, my uncle and the star of my first book, Wheeling the Deal: the Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic. He broke his neck in a hugely publicized (for the time) accident at John Marshall Junior High in Pasadena in October 1940. Gordon had sprinted down a pad in a small gym during P.E. class that rainy day, bounced off a springboard and tried grabbing gymnast rings set above ever-mounting mats. It went horribly and gruesomely awry, because the malfunctioning springboard catapalted him sideways and he tripped over the mats on his way up without any means to cushion his fall. People there still remember the sickening position of his body. At the time, the rambunctious kids in Gordon’s acrobatic group, who were messing around without supervision but warned not to try anything daring, tabbed their game “Tarzan.” Johnny Weismuller was their matinee hero, and in their heads they were swinging through the vines like him when they reached those rings. If they reached those rings.
Twenty-seven years later, Gordon, by then an impossibly successful Hollywood post-production mini-baron, elevator-music trafficker and round-the-clock idea man who weighed all of 95 pounds when out of his wheelchair, was vacuuming new programs up. A single episode of “Tarzan” was one of them (though not the sample video posted above). I can only imagine the irony and pain and symetry he must’ve felt seeing it run, because he couldn’t after his Tarzan swan-dive. (BTW, the 1967 Tarzan spoke pitch-perfect English for a jungle kid.) Those degrees of separation must feel like collapsing walls if you don’t have a thirst for the future. Thankfully, my overachieving dynamo of an uncle did!
This is sometimes what happens, folks, when successful, long-running shows sputter out. They regenerate like sunglass-wearing amoeba with a slightly altered title. Soon, they bring on fresh cast members, try out-there plots and if they’re not careful, they jump the shark of amusing believability for audiences with impatient TV clickers. In this case, a traditional, live-action sitcom became a cartoon. Anything to wring the last drop of entertainment — and royalty chain — was attempted.
Naturally, one show’s fumes is somebody’s opportunity. My uncle, the subject of my first book, Wheeling the Deal: the Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic, never squandered an opportunity. Being a crippled businessman in Hollywood, he had no choice. So he often pitched work to aging legends, be it the Stooges’ producers here, “Woody Woodpecker” creator Walter Lantz, “Flipper-Gentle-Ben-Seahunt”-et-al producer Ivan Tors, or the late great black architect, Paul Williams. Gordon served as music supervisor for 24 episodes of the “New Three Stooges,” according to IMDB. The cartoon figures animated here move more in one clip than Gordon could in all the years after his horrific, paralyzing accident in 1940 Pasadena. But he sure learned how to deliver good post-production services and found himself on the coat-tails of a comedic franchise as a result. Enjoy the clip from the episode entitled “The Noisy Silent Movie.”
* POINT: The Ontario International Airport is worse than Los Angeles City Hall’s red-haired stepchild. It’s more akin to the deserted, forlorn cousin promised housing in a garden shed. Glad folks are just learning this.
- From the L.A. Times: “After three decades of steady growth and earning a Forbes magazine nod as one of the nation’s top “alternative airports,” Ontario International is now among the fastest-declining midsize airports in the country. A pillar of pride for the Inland Empire, which rode the housing boom to a colossal bust, the sprawling facility owned and operated by the city of Los Angeles lost a third of its 7.2 million annual passengers between 2007 and 2010. The airport is on track to lose an additional 200,000 this year — setting it back to 1987 levels, when Ronald Reagan was president and the Dow was below 3,000. Nationally, only Cincinnati is shedding travelers at a faster pace …”
* COUNTER-POINT: (A.K.A. first to the punch): my piece on this subject from way back when.
- “Thirty-six years ago, during the money-loathing Summer of Love, Los Angeles got control of the air at a bead-like price. For $1.2-million and future concessions, the city bought a postage-stamp airport in the dusty flatlands of the Inland Empire in the era before the subdivisions and chain-malls invaded. Though dry in detail, if not colonial in result, the 1967-transaction provided each side with something immediately useful. Los Angeles International Airport secured a backup landing strip for those nights coastal fog (or smog) socked in its runways. Ontario inherited a strapping big-city patriarch that could lure commercial jetliners to the scruffy, San Bernardino County outpost while chasing federal dollars to expand it. Ontario’s airfield was barely more than parched earth and booster dreams when L.A. came along. It had taken World War II training needs to convert the dirt runways there to concrete, and defense contractors after that to bulk up the facilities. The first passenger terminal, one converted from a hybrid chapel-theater-canteen, didn’t rise until the 1960s. It was bush league at best …”
* POINT: The cities of Glendale, Burbank and northwest Los Angeles have tried their level best to keep hexavalent chromium (chrome-six, “The Erin Brockovich chemical) under state standards by either diluting the tainted fluid with fresh suppies, shutting off compromised acquifers or just dumping the stuff into the Los Angeles River. Research in Glendale, meantime, is underway to figure out how to remove the industrial contaminant point blank. This is an enormous issue where the Cold War, environmental science, Superfund policies and municipal water management weave in and out of the water table pocked by decades of defense manufacturing (mainly Lockheed), chrome plating and other industrial work involving heavy metals. You just wouldn’t know it’s a crisis from the scant media coverage. Consider this short piece from the L.A. Times:
- “Although the City Council last week approved spending an additional $400,000 to continue research at two testing facilities — just two months after the council gave the green light to spend $550,000 in grant and state funding on more research — some city officials are getting antsy …”
* COUNTERPOINT: My old article that launched a series and community hullaballoo about local chrome-six contamination after I worked with the L.A. Times in 2000 exposing the problem. Sometimes, it seems like we all have dementia when it comes to remembering that there’s an unusually pernicious toxin infesting our water. Maybe it was the recession or terrorism that made us kick this can down the road? Or, environmental fatigue? Couldn’t be politics (insert laugh track) or the sheer magnitude of the problem, could it?
Not to start off like the late Andy Rooney, but have you ever had a person in your life who was so extraordinarily selfless, so brimming with grace and unconditional love that you sometimes marveled at your luck having them in your orbit of earthly acquaintances? It’s a rhetorical question, folks, a setup, because let’s fess up. Most people focus on themselves. It’s the curse of our self-absorbed society. It’s the DNA of the modern world that records everything we do and taunts us with digital playbacks.
So, when a loved-one or friend or acquaintance is loathe to use the word “I” or “me” continually in your time around them, focusing themselves on how you’re doing, on what’s good in your life and not the hardship or injustices in theirs, you know you’ve hit paydirt with a pretty special human being. This, in a nutshell, was Marion Seeman, one of the best people I’ve ever met and probably ever will. “Cookie” – that’s generally what she called people she was fond of, and with a name like Chip … Lord knows I yearn to hear her call me that again. When that will be I’m not sure.
Marion died recently, in her nineties, with nary a complaint or a soul burdened by regret, jealousy or self-pity. She was the sweet breeze in our lives who almost seemed immortal. But Marion was far more than the kindly old lady in the same curly brown wig, the first person to show up to parties and the first to leave in that aging sedan she drove, usually before anyone realized that she had split. For these events, she baked lemon bars or oatmeal cookies on a tight budget, never dreaming of showing up someplace emptyhanded, but always with enough for her other friends. By unwitting example, she was teaching us about giving more than taking. And basking in the hands dealt us.
Marion was one of my mom’s best friends tracing back to 1930′s Sierra Madre. Marion and her mother, Florence, had relocated here from Hollywood to ease Marion’s asthma in a story similar to my uncle Gordon’s (the guy I wrote a biography about in Wheeling the Deal). For a bit, Marion worked at Columbia Pictures in a gig arranged by Harry Cohn, the studio president who had a heavy-duty crush on Marion’s mom. Anyway, my mom, then Muriel Zahler, and Marion were your typical, animated late-teen girls in those pre-World War II days, deep into fashion magazines, cute boys, family obligations and patriotic spirit. Sometimes even a little beer. Or a little blackout-drill high jinx.
Over the years, as marriages came and life’s speedbumps cropped up, that kinship continued all the way into my adulthood. Marion, the widower, never acted the loney soul. She rarely, if ever asked my mom for much, only what she could do for her in times of personal grief. Never, in all the time that I knew her, did she bemoan the fact she never got to be a mom when she would’ve been a fabulous parent. Never did she decry the thinning finances that forced her to move to a succession of smaller places around Monrovia. She was just grateful for another day.
What Marion really did — and this was after many years spent as a secretary at defense contractor Honeywell — was throw her heart into volunteering for the Red Cross, spread warmth over the people she held dear, enjoy summer trips back to family in Minnesota, all the while focusing her eyes on the beauty that lies within each one of those supremely fortunate enough to receive her tangy lemon bars. Sometimes, I don’t think I deserved them from somone as at peace with her circumstances as her.
In her final days, Marion’s spirit remained strong, even if her appetite and breathing did not. Her faith got her through this hairpin life with flying colors, a faith that was never pious or ideological, just sincerely grounded. Christianity could hardly have a better representative than her. St. Francis-like in spades, actually.
The question is obvious and I don’t blame you for posing it. Why am I writing about an “old woman” with a light-bright smile and an affection for ceramic angels and real cats on a writer’s blog? Because Marion Seeman set the bar on grace with a benevolent demeanor and easygoing compassion in ways that influenced who I am.
In her honor, I am posting this Squeeze song “Some Fantastic Place,” one of my favorites. It’s about a friend of the songwriter who was stricken with leukemia and dreamed about what heaven would look like while leaving behind a heavenly legacy among those she knew.
Marion – I know you’re in Some Fantastic Place. Say hey to my mom and keep your lemon bars ready for us!
* I love this type of story. Ingenuity meets necessity. Graps exceeds reach. A scientific revolution that might lubricate social harmony. Orbital power plants: a warming, exhaust-laden envivorment needs you.
“The sun’s abundant energy, if harvested in space, could provide a cost-effective way to meet global power needs in as little as 30 years with seed money from governments, according to a study by an international scientific group. Orbiting power plants capable of collecting solar energy and beaming it to Earth appear “technically feasible” within a decade or two based on technologies now in the laboratory, a study group of the Paris-headquartered International Academy of Astronautics said … ” Colonel Michael Smith, the U.S. Air Force’s chief futurist as director of the Center for Strategy and Technology at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, said the idea has the potential to send safe, clean electrical energy worldwide “if we can make it work. “Isn’t that what government and industry should be working to do?” he said in a telephone interview.
“The idea of beaming down power from outer space has surfaced in science-fiction stories and government studies for decades now. Commercial deals have been struck, prototype satellites have been proposed, international initiatives have been announced. But has any real progress been made toward developing space-based solar power systems? That’s what we’re talking about this Sunday on “Virtually Speaking Science.”
* In less inspiring news, check out this New York Times story detailing President Obama’s decision to pare back on anti-smog rules. We’re in 2011, but it’s the same story that it’s been for decades. When political fortunes go south and the economy sputters, hard-won environmental regulation is recast as reckless oversight so our government leaders can water them down, to hell wilth the consequences. Maybe some day Uncle Sam will, green-wise, grow up to the point it stops creating false choices. Maybe.
From the New York Times (with their standard picture of a polluted L.A. skyline):
“The summons from the president came without warning the Thursday before Labor Day. As she was driven the four blocks to the White House, Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, suspected that the news would not be good. What she did not see coming was a rare public rebuke the president was about to deliver by rejecting her proposal to tighten the national standard for smog. The half-hour meeting in the Oval Office was not a negotiation; the president had decided against ratcheting up the ozone rule because of the cost and the uncertainty it would impose on industry and local governments. He clearly understood the scientific, legal and political implications. He told Ms. Jackson that she would have an opportunity to revisit the Clean Air Act standard in 2013 — if they were still in office. We are just not going to do this now, he said … The full retreat on the smog standard was the first and most important environmental decision of the presidential campaign season that is now fully under way. An examination of that decision, based on interviews with lobbyists on both sides, former officials and policy makers at the upper reaches of the White House and the E.P.A., illustrates the new calculus on political and policy shifts as the White House sharpens its focus on the president’s re-election …”
Watch him roll victoriously onto the fileld with his teammates after surviving the nearly unsurvivable.
” … On October 16, 2010, I was a junior playing special teams for Rutgers during a midseason game against Army. We were playing at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., not far from our campus. With the game tied at 17 and about five minutes left in the fourth quarter, I ran downfield after a kickoff and collided with the returner, Malcolm Brown. I hit him pretty good — I learned later that he broke his collarbone on the play. But I tucked my head. If you have a strong stomach, you can watch it for yourself. (Personally, I do it all the time. It’s the last football play I ever made. I figure I might as well watch it.)
I remember feeling like I had a full-body “stinger” and that the wind was knocked out of me. But when I tried to move, I couldn’t. My mom was in the stands and right away she knew something was wrong when she saw me fall so stiffly. I was taken from the field on a stretcher, and when I tried to give a thumbs-up and let the crowd know I was OK, it felt like there was an unmovable weight on my hands. I had fractured my c-3 and c-4 vertebrae and was rushed into emergency surgery.
The doctors told my mom that I would never walk again, that I would never come off the ventilator — which I did five weeks later. My mom did not allow the doctors to talk to me because she didn’t want me to hear anything negative. She was the one who told me I had broken my neck and was paralyzed from the neck down. I had just turned 20 …
I’ve spent a lot of the last year in rehab trying to retrain my body to walk. It’s all about baby steps, so to speak, but I’m making progress. Right now I’m standing in a standing frame and I can last for up to 45 minutes. (The first time I did it as an inpatient, I lasted 30 seconds, so that’s progress!) After 17 minutes or so, though, I get dizzy and I need a shock. Because of my injury and the damage to my spinal cord, the blood flows to my legs but doesn’t know to circulate back to my brain. So the muscle needs to be stimulated, a signal needs to be sent to transfer the blood and oxygen back up. The next phase is to move onto locomotive training with a harness to hold me up.
By now I’ve become an expert on the human body, especially the autonomic nervous system. So much goes through the spine, it’s amazing. For instance, I don’t sweat. The body’s trigger to sweat — to cool itself — goes through the nervous system and that signal doesn’t work with me right now. So on top of everything else, I have to be careful not to overheat.
People have asked me about whether my injury makes me rethink football and how dangerous it is. My answer: not at all. No hard feelings, football. I don’t think kickoffs should be eliminated or changed either. Before this, I had never had a serious injury. Think of how many kickoffs there were in college football and how few get paralyzed. It was just a freak accident.
I’ve had low moments, but I can probably count them on one hand. My attitude is that I don’t have time to be bitter and do the why-me? thing. I have to get better, and getting down doesn’t help me do that. You can’t change the outcome so why bother? I think that God chose me to go through this for a reason: so other people going through adversity can look at me for inspiration. I’m also trying to bring attention to spinal cord injuries. They affect millions of Americans and there’s some real progress being made. But it takes funding. I encourage people to go to http://www.justadollarplease.org/, which supports the research of Dr. Wise Young, a neuroscience professor at Rutgers. The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation at christopherreeve.org is another organization dedicated to finding a cure for spinal cord injuries.
To read his entire story in Sports Illustrated, click here. Eric and my quadriplegic uncle, Gordon Zahler, would’ve been kindred buddies. Gordon was a C-3/C-4 quadriplegic now striding fully in some fantastic place.
And his involvement might’ve been stranger than the plot to “Plan Nine from Outer Space,” still regarded by movie experts as one of the most dreadful films of all time. (Sorry “City Slickers II.”)
Gordon Zahler, you see, couldn’t move a muscle, let alone lead an orchestra or play an instrument. He was a full-blown quadriplegic that resulted from a wicked gynmastics fall he took as a fourteen-year-old boy in 1940 Pasadena. A decade-plus later, flouting multiple prognoses that he wouldn’t live a year with a broken neck and the complications it presented, Gordon was building a Hollywood post-production company that no one could imagine. A “cripple” in show biz? Running a legitimate company? Please.
Gordon’s company was General Music Corp., and the small shop with that conglomerate-type name was located in a cramped office on the back side of what is now KTLA on Sunset Blvd. It was devoted to selling background scores to nascent TV and movies at a time when the unions were driving music costs through the roof.
Gordon’s initial supply came from the music that his composer/arranger/musician father, Lee Zahler (my maternal grandfather), had produced during his prolific career in Hollywood — a career, tragically and ironically, cut short by the broken spirirt he suffered after his son’s accident and the personal and financial toll it took on the family.
Picture the scene in 1950′s L.A. Wood, with the cheesy moustache and big heart that exceeded his directorial talent, convinces Gordon to bring his wares to the production. Maybe it was the other way around, Gordon using a special phone headset to dial Wood, who had a fondness for women’s clothing, especially angora sweaters. Up until then, Gordon’s success was hit and miss. General Music was furnishing pre-recorded music and whole scores to early TV shows like “The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok” and “The Red Skelton Show,” but my mother’s little brother wanted an entree into the movie world. Wood gave him that chance, though people later fascinated by Wood’s “Plan 9″ personnel — we’re talking Criswell, an Elivra vampire figure, a professional-wrestler-turned-actor, a morphine-junkie lead actor in Bela Lugosi, etc. — apparently overlooked the fact that a wheelchair-bound businessman who weighed 95 pounds drippping wet and needed help just scratching his nose was in fact an intergral part of the effort.
* Why Central California — yup, the San Joaquin Valley — is such a smog breeding ground. From the Atlantic:
“… One of the big things we’re dealing with is that we have a 1 to 2 ratio of people to vehicle miles traveled,” says Jaime Holt at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. These mobile sources of emissions add to the Valley’s problems, but Holt argues they’re not the main cause. The region’s agriculture is responsible for much of the region’s pollution. Up until a few years ago, farmers in the region would regularly burn brush and cuttings at the end of the season, creating huge sources of particulate matter in the air. A new state law, enforced since 2004, regulates the emissions of the agriculture industry in the state, and Holt says the Valley’s pollution problems have already started to decline. In 2002, more than 4,600 tons of 2.5-microgram particulate matter was recorded. In 2008, that figure was down to 1,600 tons. The problem is getting better, but it’s by no means solved. As agricultural burn-offs continue to decrease, the Valley can expect to see its air quality improve. But regardless of the value of those improvements, its geography and meteorology distinctly disadvantage it to suffer below average air quality …”
* Ever wonder about the quality of the air you breathe on airlines in that closed environment? Yep, we did, , too, and so have others. Here’s a story about potential domino lawsuits and a focus on what is either a dirty secret or an environmental mole-hill. MSBNChas the goods:
“A former flight attendant is believed to be the first person in the U.S. to settle a lawsuit against the Boeing Co. over what she claims is faulty aircraft design that allowed toxic fumes to reach the cabin, triggering tremors, memory loss and severe headaches. The amount and other details of the settlement Wednesday between former American Airlines worker Terry Williams, a 42-year-old mother of two, and Boeing were not made public as a condition of the agreement. But 250,000 pages of company documents turned over to the plaintiff’s legal team by Boeing seem certain to fuel the long-running battle over the safety of cabin air in commercial jetliners. “The issue is really heating up now,” Judith Murawski, a Seattle-area based industrial hygienist for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, told msnbc.com, adding that she typically handles at least three new cases a week involving crew members exposed to fumes. Many calls come from crew members on their way to emergency rooms or urgent care clinics, she said …”
* You know your president is in trouble when his once bedrock convictions begin crumbling like a cracker dropped into a glass of water. Once more, we are showing ourselves to be the land of the short-sighted. Haven’t we already decided the environment matters and that sweeping, wholesale deregulation is not only recklessly unhealthy but economically dangerous? Who pays for all those pollution-sickened folks? Hint: you and me! The Washington Post, of course, has the lowdown.
“President Obama’s controversial decision last week to suspend new anti-smog standards offered hints — but not the full road map — of how the White House will navigate politically explosive battles with congressional Republicans over which industry regulations to sacrifice and which ones to fight for this fall. The Friday decision, which angered many environmental activists and won praise from business groups, represented the most high-profile case in a debate that carries deep implications for Obama’s reelection campaign as he tries to spur job creation, woo business donors and fire up his voting base. It came as the president prepares for a major address Thursday night to lay out a new employment strategy … The ozone decision signaled a new phase in Washington warfare. For their first two years, Obama and his team pushed through ambitious legislative initiatives such as the economic stimulus, the health-care overhaul and a rewrite of the financial regulatory system. Now, newly empowered congressional Republicans are driving an agenda of smaller government, deficit reduction and regulatory rollbacks that GOP lawmakers say will help spur job growth. And Obama, his presidency on the line amid fading hopes of a near-term economic recovery, is eager to show that he, too, recognizes the need to curb government overreach. At the same time, he needs to reassure anxious advocates on the left, many of whom have complained since last month’s debt-ceiling deal that the president has become too easily cowed by Republican arguments. It is a delicate balancing act for a president still searching for the right formula to spark the economy to life at the same time that he hopes to win back crucial independent voters.
