FEATURED POSTS
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September 15, 2015
Port Town Redux
Former Long Beach Harbor Commissioner Doris Topsy-Elvord is not happy with us. She doesn’t think her service on the harbor board from March 2003 to June 2008 was sufficiently recognized in Port Town, the history book the Port of Long Beach commissioned us to write in 2013.
Ms. Topsy-Elvord has taken her case to port commissioners, gotten coverage of her issues on the front and editorial pages of the Press-Telegram newspaper, and even threatened to hire an attorney.
It was not a mistake that we left Ms. Topsy-Elvord and other commissioners out of Port Town, at least by name. From the beginning, we knew that the last chapters would be the most challenging. There are several points in the writing of such a history – especially a history that has been commissioned by the entity being written about – that present challenges. We were assured at the beginning of the project that the port desired an authentic history, not one colored by the political sensibilities or politics of the present day.
That is a lot of trust to place on authors and a lot of responsibility. We were determined to live up to that trust.
In doing an extensive history of an institution, there are some sensitive landmarks the writers pass along the way. For one thing, it’s a lot easier to write about dead people than about people who are still alive. Dead people don’t care about what you say about them. People who are still alive – especially high-achieving people with strong egos – have their own version of their contributions, sometimes much inflated from reality and how others may view them.
Even if those people are still alive, however, if enough time has passed, it becomes much easier to recognize the outcome of their actions and write about it.
Commissioner George Talin, who left the commission in disgrace in 1991 after the District Attorney accused him of using his position to strong-arm port tenants into buying tires from his company, is a good example. Enough time has passed and Talin’s damaged reputation has been well enough established to include in the narrative.
The closer the narrative advances toward the present day, however, the stronger the ego sensitivities become. The harbor commission indeed moved its agenda forward during the past 20 years. All the commissioners made their contributions to the whole, although some were clearly stronger leaders than others.
Commissioner Carmen Perez – a power in the Democratic Party – was appointed in the 1990s to a Harbor Commission that included four Republican businessmen. It makes sense to have businessmen on the Harbor Commission. The port is a big business that deals in negotiations with tenants and it’s important to keep an eye of the bottom line. But it’s also a political institution that relies on government support and direction. In a strongly Democratic state, Ms. Perez was able to advance the port’s political and funding agenda in ways the other four commissioners were not capable of achieving.
Ms. Topsy-Elvord mentions former harbor commissioner Mario Cordero, now chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission. Mr. Cordero was clearly a strong voice for an environmental ethic at the port. So was former commissioner and former city manager Jim Hankla, who as director of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority oversaw one of the most successful environmental transportation projects ever undertaken in California.
Attorney Susan Anderson Wise was steadfast in her service on the board. Engineer Nick Sramek was successful in getting political and legal support for his neighborhood, which had been heavily impacted by the Union Pacific’s Intermodal Container Transfer Facility next door. David Hauser, Alex Bellehumeur, Roy Hearrean, John Hancock, former city attorney John Calhoun, accountant George Murchison, and educator Dr. Mike Walter all served with distinction.
And, of course, Ms. Topsy-Elvord herself.
We knew that former and present harbor commissioners would be disappointed not to see their individual contributions recognized by name, but that was a decision we made as the authors. Our job was not to massage the egos of the various political appointees to the board, but to tell the story of the port and of the accomplishments – and sometimes the failures – of the board as a whole.
The truth is that all the members of the harbor commission contributed to the success of the port programs – some more so and some less so. For us to define which members deserved how much of the credit for each success was an impossible task and far beyond the scope of the book.
Over the years, there have been 67 harbor commissioners, 20 of them in the last 20 years, including the five commissioners currently occupying those seats. Most of them were decent people who took their jobs on the harbor commission seriously and did what they felt was best for the port and the city.
That does not mean they didn’t sometimes disagree with one another – sometimes strongly disagree – but in the end, they made their cases to the full board, they voted as a board on new policies and direction, and the port moved forward in the manner in which the board as a whole decided.
They were indeed a diverse group, both ethnically and in the perspective they brought to the table. They included several businessmen, several former government administrators and workers, one college professor, five lawyers, one physician, and a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
There were Carmen Perez, the second woman to sit on the board and the first Hispanic commissioner; Dr. John Kashiwabara, the first Japanese-American and second medical doctor to so serve; Doris Topsy-Elvord, the first African-American commissioner; Mario Cordero, the first Hispanic man to sit on the board, Thomas Fields, the first African-American man on the board and the first African-American harbor commissioner to be fired by the City Council; and Susan E. Anderson Wise, the fourth woman to sit on the board.
The present commission includes Doug Drummond, a former Long Beach police officer and councilman; Richard T. Dines, the first union longshoreman; and Lori Ann Guzman, Lou Anne Bynum, and Tracy J. Egoscue, the fifth, sixth, and seventh women on the board. It is also the first board with a female majority.
There was one commissioner whose name we had included in the last chapter of the book, and that was Commissioner Thomas Fields. The submitted draft included a very short mention that Fields had been fired by the city council. We thought it was significant to include because it marked the end to a battle between two factions on the port board. With Fields gone, fellow Commissioner Nick Sramek resigned, clearing the way for a change in the board’s approach. That item was removed from the manuscript at the insistence of Mayor Robert Garcia’s office.
PUTTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
The Press-Telegram has treated us very well on Port Town, but we must take issue with some of the points made in the recent Press-Telegram editorial on the book.
One, “much of the 21st century is given short shrift.”
For the Port of Long Beach, the 21st Century is a work in progress. If one were writing a history of the Revolutionary War, for instance, that story is complete. The history of the Revolution can be told from the dumping of tea in the Boston Harbor in 1773 to the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
Unlike the Revolutionary War, the history of the Port of Long Beach is not over yet. The challenge was always how does one end an ongoing story. And the answer is that you end it imperfectly. It is similar to the old science fiction movies in which giant mutant grasshoppers have been exposed to radiation and are now destroying the city, until a few brave souls find a way to stop them. And when it’s all over, the words “The End,” appear on the screen, followed by a big question mark.
Now, as always, there are many challenges and question marks facing the port. Everybody is clamoring to take credit for the clean truck program, but the price of the program was huge and the final level of success is yet to be determined.
The volume of containerized cargo coming through the port is only now beginning to reach the level that it was when the great recession hit in 2006. Progress is not always pretty. History lurches forward as the people who make the history attempt to find new solutions to both old and new problems.
There are many issues ahead, including the replacement of longshore workers with computerized and robotic equipment. The union is concerned about the jobs of its members, and well it should be. In fact, all of us should be concerned. Those healthy longshore pay checks end up supporting a lot of folks in the community, from shoe stores to supermarkets and from dog groomers to the kids working at McDonalds. If those longshore jobs start to disappear, the pain will spread like ripples through the local economy.
While we can – and did – identify those emerging issues, they are for future historians to examine fully and provide perspective.
Two: “While the Cunninghams wrote the book, they can’t be fully blamed for these holes. At one point it looks as if the Cunninghams, almost apologetically, try to explain why they don’t get deep in the weeds of modern history for fear that “the narrative ceases to be history and becomes instead a short-sighted journalism.”
We are responsible for the book as it is written. We shift that responsibility to no one. If we gave the impression that we were apologetic, that was not our intent. We did say that as history approaches present day, it ceases to be history and becomes merely journalism. That is correct. Journalism is by its very nature short-sighted. We remain proud of the book and the decision we made. We offer no apologies.
Three: Another chapter could be written and run in any reprint of the book. Or, a companion, part-two book could be written about the last four decades at the port and the people behind it.
This idea opens a Pandora’s box. Since such a chapter would be written to appease Ms. Topsy-Elvord, would she have approval rights over it? And if she does, shouldn’t every other living former and current harbor commissioner also be offered the opportunity to approve or disapprove of this proposed new chapter? Can you imagine a messier exercise in self-congratulation?
In a separate note: We should have included a list of all the commissioners at the end of the book – not just Ms. Topsy-Elvord. Each one of them brought their own special talents and flaws to the table, and they do deserve recognition for that. There is such a list on the port website.
When we started this project, we met on numerous occasions to discuss the book with Commissioner Drummond and now-former Commissioner Susan Anderson Wise. One of the things we discussed at those meetings was using the book as the foundation for continued education and research – possibly through the local universities, colleges and high schools.
At the time, we thought that was a wonderful idea, and we still do.
For instance, California State University, Long Beach has numerous oral histories – interviews with long-time community leaders – that are posted online. We believe that the port perhaps should work with Cal State to create an oral history with port commissioners that would be the forum for them to tell the inside story of their contributions to the community the way they see it. A volume of such interviews could be both printed and posted online, so that folks could read or listen to individual commissioners’ unique perspectives on their contributions and their time on the board. And if the stories conflict with one another, that’s OK too.
Our goal with Port Town was to create a comprehensive historical foundation of information about our port. We believe we did that, and we hope that the book both informs and inspires bright students and professors to look at the future issues facing the port in order to push forward the ongoing discussion both on the board and in the community.
–George and Carmela Cunningham
Press-Telegram July 22 story by Rich Archbold on publication of Port Town.
Press-Telegram Columnist Tim Grobaty’s Aug. 28 column on Doris Topsy-Elvord complaint
Press-Telegram Sept. 11 Editorial on Doris Topsy-Elvord complaint
http://www.presstelegram.com/opinion/20150910/why-the-long-beach-ports-story-is-still-unfinished
List of harbor commissioners on port website.
http://www.polb.com/commission/commissionhistory.asp#hankla
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August 27, 2015
I’M BACK (ALMOST, PRETTY MUCH, SORT OF)
I’m not going to lie. Having a stroke, even a small one, is no walk in the park. It can shake you up, change the way you look at the world, and remind you that life does not go on forever. Life is finite. If there are things you want to accomplish, there are only so many years, so many months, and so many weeks, days, hours and minutes to accomplish them. This is true whether you are 7 years old or 70.
Fortunately for me, my stroke turned out to be a minor one – a reminder from the gods about what’s important and what is not. Having seen the effect it had on my wife Carmela, I cannot, and will not call it a blessing, but you take from such experiences the things that are important and positive and accept the things that are not as part of the price you pay.
I am on the rebound. I am not all the way back yet, but I hopefully will be soon. The scheduled CAT scan showed that any remaining blood clots in my brain are gone, so I am on warfarin – the generic name for Coumadin – a blood thinner that hopefully will prevent a repeat experience. Next week I will go back to have my eyes checked, to see if I have regained peripheral vision in my eyes. I am sure that I have. I find myself checking it all the time as Carmela drives through traffic. At first I thought maybe my peripheral vision was returning as the doctors said it might. Or was it just the result of wishful thinking? Now I am sure of it. The doctors will be checking it out next week and maybe, just maybe, I will be able to drive again. I hope so. Carmela, who hates to drive, hopes so, and so does our Yorkie son Henry, who likes to curl up on Carmela’s lap while I drive.
I thank everybody for their kind cards and electronic messages of encouragement. I do plan to answer everybody, but it may take a little while. I still tend to tire easily.
Lessons learned, big and small:
As my pal, Freddy Nietzsche once said, anything that doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
Everybody from birth on, has a finite number of days on the planet. Identify what is important to you, learn from your mistakes, and try to take some joy in each and every day you have
Warfarin, the blood-thinning drug that I am taking, was developed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (the WARF in Warfarin) as a rat poison in 1948. It would be mixed with food bait, which rats would return to over a period of time to eat. It took about six days of returning to the same bait for the rat to accumulate a lethal dose, then he or she would quietly bleed to death internally. One popular conspiracy theory is that Nikita Khrushchev and others in the Soviet hierarchy used warfarin to poison Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin.
With a little bit of luck, I should be back in the saddle soon, maybe even driving a car and working on my new book, “Nothing is Forever.” Until then, thanks to everybody for their kind thoughts and well wishes.
–George Cunningham
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August 7, 2015
TO MY FAMILY, FRIENDS, ASSOCIATES AND OTHERS
Thanks everybody for the well wishes sent my way over the last week. For the folks who haven’t heard, I suffered two minor strokes late last month. I stupidly ignored the first one – there was no pain – and dismissed it as a case of being overly tired. The second one was impossible to ignore. At lunch at the Belmont Brewery in Long Beach, the conversation became disjointed, and although I could understand words and even phrases, I had no comprehension of what people were saying. I also had trouble seeing them. I did not tell anybody this information.
I have fought in a war, I have been in fist fights, I have lived by the male code – if you’re not dead, shake it off and move on. I drove home, not my best decision considering my limited vision, and fell into bed. Within seconds, I was asleep and slept until the next morning.
When I awoke, I was still having vision problems, although I still did not tell anyone. Finally, my wife, Carmela, nagged that information out of me. Unburdened by male pride and stubbornness, Carmela rushed me to Kaiser for an emergency eye exam, where they discovered I have glaucoma. They also discovered I had limited to no vision in the upper right quadrant of both eyes. That is not an eye problem – that is a brain problem.
By that evening, I was lying in a hospital room in one of those little backless gowns with an IV in my arm and peeing into a little plastic container with the help of my wife.
When I was in Vietnam, Carmela was 9 years old. Too bad. We could have used somebody like her when the bullets started flying. This whole experience was much worse for her than for me, but she did not once fall apart, at least not until it was all over.
So I’m back. Not quite as strong as I was, but a lot smarter. I remain at high risk for yet another stroke until I can start taking a blood thinner – something I cannot do until the doctors are sure that any blood clot remaining in my brain has dissolved. Otherwise it could cause any remaining clot to break loose and trigger yet another stroke.
We hope to be able to start treatment in another week or so and to be in a better place by September.
Promises and advice to my friends – and even my enemies:
Take care of yourself. If you experience any confusion or other such symptoms, go immediately to the emergency room and tell them you think you may have had a stroke. There is a four-hour window in which they can mitigate the damage
Unless I regain full vision, I will not drive. Your children are safe from me
This final promise is to my loyal and loving wife. I plan to live forever. I go into this battle understanding, I probably will most certainly lose. But when that time does come I plan to go down fighting.
And finally, because of my eye problems, I will not be posting on Facebook or Twitter for the next month to give my eyes a chance to recover. If you want to contact me, my email address is: cunham@aol.com. I won’t be checking it, but Carmela will.
Thank you for your well wishes, and I will be back in touch – hopefully thinner, healthier, and better looking.
Love to everybody and kisses to all the girls.
George Cunningham
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August 5, 2015
A DIGITAL DILEMMA
By George Cunningham
I want to surprise my wife with a little gift every now and then. But there is a gang of evil-doers out there with nothing better to do than thwart my efforts to be a good husband. Those evil-doers go by the names of American Express aka AMEX, MasterCard aka MC, and Visa, aka Visa.Here’s an example. My wife has a birthday coming up in a few weeks and I thought I would surprise her with a funny gift. This is not a big deal – just a little gag to make her laugh. How much is my wife’s surprise and laughter worth? Let’s say 20 bucks.
So, I go on line and I order her a Colorama coloring book. You may have seen the ads for the Colorama book on TV. This is the commercial where the woman enthusiastically declares, “I look forward to jumping into bed with my Colorama book, and melting away the stress of the day,” then it shows a picture of her in bed, coloring her heart out. It’s so sad, that it’s funny. And every time we see the ad, we laugh at that poor woman, who after all is just an actress.
So I figure when the Colorama book arrives, I will wrap it up real pretty and give it to my wife and wait for the howls of laughter to begin. Unfortunately, that’s never going to happen, because my wife is a woman of the 21st Century. Within hours after I order her gift, American Express sends her an email saying our joint card was used to order a Colorama adult coloring book, and is that OK with her. American Express claims they do this for security reasons, but I suspect they just have a grudge against me and want to break up my marriage. Why would they harbor such animosity against me? You’ll have to ask them.
All I know is that instead of howls of birthday laughter, what I got for my money is my wife, sitting at her computer, saying why in hell did you order one of those stupid Colorama books? Well, I explained, and of course, she forgave me … no thanks to American Express.
I liked the old days better. Back when if you used your credit card foolishly, you just threw away that little receipt and nobody was the wiser until the monthly bill arrived in the mail. As they say, “that ship has sailed” and here I am standing on the dock with a stupid look on my face and a coloring book in my hand.
Thanks a lot, American Express. I hope you’re happy now.
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July 29, 2015
PORT TOWN SIGNING
We finished writing Port Town on Halloween of last year, but there is a huge difference between completing a manuscript and holding the finished product in your hand. The editing and design folks at the Port of Long Beach did an incredible job of putting together the commemorative copy of the book with leatherette cover and copper-gilded pages. We spent a recent afternoon signing the books for special presentations. The book – Port Town, How the People of Long Beach Built, Defended, and Profited from Their Harbor – is available in both printed soft-cover on Amazon.com for $10.70 and in digital format for $1.99. It is free for download on iTunes. A limited number of the commemorative copies will be available for sale at the Long Beach Historic Society in August.
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