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05/15/06
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
Don't light up that cigarette, not even outside. Has Calabasas taken no-smoking zones too far?
>> We have border issues. We have terrorist issues. We have economy issues. To have people focus on individual smokers and not allowing them to smoke even outside, I think is completely ridiculous and it's pretty un-American.
Val Zavala>> And then, the entire surfboard business depended on him, then he quit. Will the surfing industry ride out the wave or wipe out?
These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> It's the toughest no-smoking law in California. The upscale town of Calabasas has declared the great outdoors a no-smoking zone. Now since the early 1990s, Californians have been used to not lighting up in restaurants and offices, but outside? Isn't that going a bit too far? For some answers, we sent Anne McDermott to the west valley town of Calabasas.
Anne McDermott>> Smoking. It's been banned in public buildings in California for about ten years. Now one small comfortable community just outside Los Angeles is taking the ban one step further.
Barry Groveman>> What we've done is we've extended the protection against second hand smoke to the outside.
Anne McDermott>> That's Calabasas City Council member, Barry Groveman, who helped spearhead the measure officially called the Comprehensive Second Hand Smoke Control Ordinance, and it means no smoking in the great outdoors wherever the public gathers. But don't call it a ban, says Groveman. This is not a return to the days of prohibition.
Barry Groveman>> We don't try to prohibit things. Those things don't work. What we did was, we struck a good balance. We're basically saying that you can smoke, but you should do it in an area where you don't expose others. You don't expose people who want to breath or need to breath clean air.
Anne McDermott>> In other words, you can smoke in designated smoking areas and, so far, there are four such designated smoking areas, four in the city of twenty-five thousand. Applications for twenty more smoking sites are pending. But some smokers say that's not enough. On the other hand, some supporters of the ordinance didn't want to give smokers any areas. Listen to this testimony given at a City Council meeting in February from someone too young to smoke.
Nolan Burkholder>> "You say that people will be permitted to smoke in designated unenclosed areas and shopping mall common areas and that's like having a peeing section in the swimming pool."
Anne McDermott>> Well, this woman who works in Calabasas and prefers that we do not use her name supports smokers' rights and she doesn't even smoke.
>> One by one, I think we just started having our rights taken away.
Anne McDermott>> Groveman begs to differ.
Barry Groveman>> Rights are limited to when you start to impact or hurt somebody else. For example, your right to drive ends when you have a drink.
Anne McDermott>> Let's review. You can't smoke on the sidewalks. You can't smoke at outdoor cafes. You can't smoke at bus stops. You can't even smoke at a parking lot. And you can't even smoke in your car. That is, you can't smoke in your car if you're near the public unless you keep your windows shut.
So how did it come to this in Calabasas where one of the founders clearly enjoyed his nicotine? Well, you could say it all began last summer with this young resident, Margo Arnold. She doesn't smoke, but found she couldn't escape it even outdoors.
Margo Arnold>> Well, I was outside having lunch one day at The Commons and I started getting headaches from second hand smoke being blown in by the smokers around me. I got sort of frustrated with this, myself having the problems of smoke, and then I also saw families having to move their little children table to table and push strollers out of the way.
Anne McDermott>> So she took her complaints to the City Council and, this year, the tough new ordinance went into effect oddly enough on March 17, the same day that the satirical feature film, "Thank You For Smoking", was released. But back in the real world of Calabasas, you won't find any smoking police here. Security guards outside stores and businesses handle the violators or people can simply call City Hall to report noncompliance.
Smokers can face fines of as much as five hundred dollars, but so far, people have been obeying the law, which doesn't surprise Groveman, an attorney who specializes in environmental issues. He says that's because people care about their health.
Barry Groveman>> The state of California, after we enacted this, after we enacted this, made a finding that second hand smoke is now to be treated in California as a "dangerous air pollutant" and, when they made that finding, they indicated they had reviewed well over eight hundred studies and concluded that these risks of serious injury and death were irrefutable.
Anne McDermott>> Others say courtesy is another key issue, but can such a thing be legislated? Groveman, again, thinks so.
Barry Groveman>> We're just saying would you mind moving out of the doorway away from the theater entrance and please go to a designated area where you can do that, much the same as in an airport where you can't smoke in the terminal, but there are designated areas that allow everybody to work together. It's elevating courtesy to a new level.
Anne McDermott>> Smokers say they could use some courtesy as well, like this woman, a smoker, who prefers to remain anonymous. As a smoker, do you sometimes feel like a pariah?
>> Absolutely, absolutely. Socially, it is unacceptable. You learn to curtail it during the course of business, during the course of, you know, social functions, but I still do it and I just find those places where I'm hopefully not infringing upon anybody else's right to do what they're doing.
Anne McDermott>> But anti-smokers feel the heat too. Some City Council members have received threats.
Barry Groveman>> I got one that said, "The way to deal with you is a short rope and a tall tree."
Anne McDermott>> Meanwhile, let's hear from Stevie Mason. She smokes, but sometimes even she finds smoke irritating, so she doesn't have a problem with the new ordinance and one of these days, she adds, she's going to quit.
Stevie Mason>> I am slowly quitting and this law definitely helps me not smoke as much because normally if I could quit smoking, I probably would. But you know, I don't now, so it's helping me.
Anne McDermott>> Others may be less interested in getting help. They want to smoke and they've discovered that the Calabasas restaurant, Sagebrush Cantina, is actually not in Calabasas. It's twenty feet outside the city line, so smokers can eat and smoke in the outdoor dining area.
Charlie Halstead>> Smokers are happy, yeah. They're very happy. We get people that call in and say, "We can smoke there, right?" We say, "Yeah" and they're "Good, good." A lot of people are calling in to see if they can smoke here.
Anne McDermott>> But, no, he doubts this will mean more business. For one thing, the Cantina is always packed and eventually, he says, people adjust. People make do. After all, when smoking was banned in bars in California, there were plenty who said it would never work, but it did. And maybe the consternation in Calabasas will one day seem quaint. But for now, some find it ridiculous.
>> I think that the country is off track. I think that we have large issues that need to be dealt with. They're huge. We have border issues. We have terrorist issues. We have economy issues. And to have people focus on individual smokers and not allowing them to smoke even outside, I think is completely ridiculous and it's pretty un-American.
Anne McDermott>> Then again, some in Calabasas say the process used to limit smoking was very American. After all, the public commented, the matter was put to a vote before a duly elected City Council and it passed unanimously, and yet such unanimity may have something to do with Calabasas's lack of diversity. This is a generally wealthy white suburb, but other communities are no doubt watching and waiting for the smoke to clear to see if they too will try such a bold new experiment. I'm Anne McDermott for Life and Times.
Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> It may be hard to believe, given the uproar over immigration issues recently, that overall America does a pretty good job of absorbing immigrants especially compared to some European countries. For some frank talk on immigration, we brought together three people over coffee in the kitchen of David Lehrer.
Lehrer is with CommUnity Advocates, Inc., a group that encourages innovative views on race relations. Gregory Rodriguez writes on Latino immigration and is also a columnist with the Los Angeles Times. And Reza Aslan is an Iranian immigrant, professor of religious studies at USC and author of the best-selling book, "No God But God".
David Lehrer>> Both Europe and the United States are dealing with immigrants on large scale issues and there have been very different responses. Rez, as a recent immigrant, you know, have you felt that nature of America as being an accepting one and willing to say you're here and now you're an American?
Reza Aslan>> I think it's more than just simply an accepting nature. In fact, I spent most of the early 1980s in California more or less as a Mexican.
David Lehrer>> Now did you feel some compulsion to abandon your roots?
Reza Aslan>> Yes, and that's what I mean when I say that I was a Mexican. I mean, the early 1980s was not a good time to be Iranian in the United States. I was surrounded by people who looked like me, who had the same color as I did, who were also living in immigrant families and --
David Lehrer>> -- did they speak Farsi?
Reza Aslan>> No, but I spoke Spanish (laughter) which is, you know, very easy to do if you live in this state. So it was very easy for me to just simply assimilate into Mexican culture as an intermediate step into then becoming an older person and absorbing my own Iranian culture.
Gregory Rodriguez>> After 9/11, there was a Moroccan illegal immigrant here in Los Angeles who when asked, "Well, are you getting this backlash against the Arabs and Muslims after 9/11?" He said, "No, everybody in Los Angeles thinks I'm a Mexican." (laughter) In my mind, it was the first time I had ever heard until now that somebody actually wanted to pass as a Mexican.
Reza Aslan>> I mean, with regard to Muslim communities, you're absolutely correct in this. I mean, these are communities that, for the most part, were invited into Europe as guest workers at the end of the Second World War to essentially do the work that Europeans wouldn't do. They came in in very isolated ethnic communities and that's still the case. That sense of isolation has really solidified in such a way that we're seeing a lot of these ethnic tensions really rise to the surface now in modern European society.
That doesn't happen in the United States for a number of reasons. One, most immigrants to this country, particularly immigrants from the Muslim world, have come here to pursue a better life. In other words, they've come here to really assimilate into the middle class culture. They're not guest workers, so they're far better integrated into the society.
A friend of mine who's Pakistani, but raised in the United States, went to college in Oxford. He came back and I asked him, you know, what he saw as the difference between, you know, Muslims in America and Muslims in the U.K. He said, "Well, the difference is this. If I'm in London and if I want to see a Muslim, I have to go to fish and chips shops in order to see them because that's where they are. If I'm in America and I want to go see a Muslim, I go see my doctor."
Gregory Rodriguez>> The one thing I quibble with is this notion that immigrants largely come to the United States to assimilate. I don't agree with that. I think immigrants today, as always, have come off boats or planes with the illusion that their children would be just like them. So the process of becoming American is rarely, "Hey, I'm going to stop speaking my language. I hate that food I grew up with. You know, the religion I grew up with no longer serves me."
It's not that way at all. It's usually the slow, poignant, very painful process of losing one's moorings, of losing one's path. There is a cost to become an American. You go to D.C. and you have the cab drivers from all over the world. Every time I get in a cab, I ask them, "Will your children be American?" "Oh, no, they're going to be Nigerian." "Oh, no, they'll be a hundred percent Mexican. "Oh, no." And immigrants have always been that way in the United States.
That's why Oscar Hammond, the Harvard immigration scholar, said the history of America is really not the history of immigrants. The history of America is the history of the children of immigrants. I mean, I'm third generation Mexican-American. I get, you know, well-meaning Anglos speaking to me in Spanish all the time (laughter). I mean, there is this sort of odd-like Buenos Dias. There is this sort of odd marginalization that people deal with all the time of any ideological background.
Reza Aslan>> And I think that the key issue with multiculturalism is not just separate but equal, and there is very little equal about the way in which multiculturalism is expressed in places like France or in Germany or in the Netherlands. I think we're seeing the results of that in these rising ethnic tensions that are taking place, particularly with the Muslim immigrants.
Gregory Rodriquez>> There's just one last part. I think multiculturalism is such an abstraction that could never really exist in any country because what it essentially requires is that each group maintain its own community, have its own institutions. Really, if there's one group in America that's ever been able to maintain a parallel ethnic infrastructure, it's American Jews.
But most other groups, with a sense of hospitals, colleges, but most other groups didn’t have the resources or the inclination to create parallel ethnic infrastructure and, without that, there is no multiculturalism. It's really one of these elite conceptions that it's an elite discussion. You know, let's take the cameras out to the deep San Gabriel Valley, Baldwin Park, and say, "Do you believe in multiculturalism?" Most people will look at you like you're trying to mug them.
David Lehrer>> Well, if you were to write a script for the Europeans how to meliorate the problem which is just abysmal now in Europe and every month there's another riot about something else and it's clear that the assimilation isn't taking place, what would you suggest they do? What is the model that we could provide?
Gregory Rodriguez>> An absorptive expansive sense of nationhood.
Reza Aslan>> That's right, that's right. Understanding and recognizing and expressing in a very understandable way what it means to be French, what it means to be German, the sense of identity that really does not exist in the way that it does in the United States. Now how does that happen? I have no idea. I don't have a clue how we have managed to create a country in which you have these various identities.
Gregory Rodriguez>> The lack of history, in part. The fact that most people, other than the Native Americans, came from somewhere else, the fact that we're all essentially immigrants and insecure about our status, they were all jockeying for American-ness. The host society only has a certain part in the world. It's the children and the grandchildren of immigrants themselves that are going to have to fight to expand the notion of German-ness and French-ness and so on in the same way that we've done here. Here, we claim American-ness. We fight for American-ness.
David Lehrer>> So the kind of melting pot that we talked about fifty years ago really seems to be working in America and may well be a model that our European friends can model themselves after.
Gregory Rodriguez>> It seems to be the only model right now for the future of a globalized world.
David Lehrer>> On that positive note, I'd like to thank you, Greg, and thank you, Reza, for joining us and we'll have to do it again and refill our cups.
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Val Zavala>> It's hard to imagine that the closing of one small factory in Orange County could have such a major impact on a six billion dollar industry, but that's just what's happened and the industry is surfing. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, tells us that one man's decision to close his business has created a sea change for surfboards.
Roger Cooper>> You probably always thought that the world of surfing revolved around places like Huntington Beach, Hawaii or here at San Clemente, but you were wrong. The true center of the surfing universe turns out to have been this small factory located miles inland in Laguna Niguel.
Clark Foam has been a dominant player in the billion dollar surfboard industry, amassing ninety percent of its United States market and helping Orange County achieve a similar whopping proportion of the market for all surfing-related products. That's because for four decades Clark Foam has turned out the foam cores, or blanks, from which virtually all the world's surfboards are made. So when on Monday, December 5, with no advance warning, owner Gordon Clark suddenly closed his doors and went out of business, the surfboard industry went into a panic.
Bill Stewart>> Kind of like 9/11. It was a little bit of a shock.
Midget Smith>> The day the world ended (laughter). That was the feeling anyway. It was really a shock when the bombshell just dropped on us.
Roger Cooper>> The people who make surfboards, like master shaper Midget Smith, and Bill Stewart of Stewart Surfboards couldn't believe it. They'd just lost the raw material their livelihoods depended on.
Bill Stewart>> I'd had hip surgery and I was laying on my couch when I found out. Me and my dad jumped in my hotrod and he drove me down to Clark Foam. I wanted to make sure it was real.
Roger Cooper>> It was all too real, says Shawn Price who covers the surfing industry for The Orange County Register.
Shawn Price>> Well, we're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry that stretches around the world. He had about ninety percent of the North American market and about sixty percent of the international market, which is a monopoly any way you look at it.
Roger Cooper>> It was in the 1950s that Gordon "Grubby" Clark, working with surfboard legend, Hobie Alter, created the foam blank technology that made the lightweight modern surfboard possible. Clark's only explanation for getting out came in a seven-page fax saying he was closing rather than continue fighting federal and local regulators over chemical emissions at his plant.
Bill Stewart>> Litigation. I think he got litigated out of business and he's a seventy year old guy and, you know, he's done very well for himself and I don't think he really needed to fight this war.
Midget Smith>> Most of the people here went into a tailspin. They did not know if they were going to have work and what they were going to do when the foam ran out.
Roger Cooper>> Although surfing has become very big business in Orange County, it also is still an industry of many small operators shaping and painting handcrafted boards one at a time, something surf forecaster and wave rider, Charlie Fox, appreciates.
Charlie Fox>> You all of a sudden take away, again, the one necessary component, the blank, and then what do they have to shape or pedal? Nothing. So they got to go get a real job and that's terrifying. It's that concept.
Roger Cooper>> Within days of Clark Foam's closing, surfboard prices shot up by a hundred to two hundred fifty dollars in some retail shops and surfers were hanging on to their existing boards like they were gold. But to fully appreciate the impact of all of this, you need to talk with Bob Mignogna, a former publisher of Surfing Magazine. He's also on the board of the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association.
Robert Mignogna>> All goods and products sold in the United States at retail produced by the surf industry amounted to approximately $6.5 billion dollars in retail sales, so that's how big the industry is domestically. Worldwide, it's probably more than double that, so it's a thirteen to fifteen billion dollar industry worldwide. Of the six and a half billion dollars domestically, I would just venture a guess right now that ninety percent of those dollars are from companies that are based in Orange County.
Roger Cooper>> Orange County is home to the huge surfing apparel industry and almost all the major surfing magazines are headquartered in or close to San Clemente.
Robert Mignogna>> In fact, there's a strip of Orange County from Huntington Beach to Irvine along the 405 Freeway that's commonly referred to in the surf industry by executives as Velcro Valley. The velcro refers to velcro used in a board short to affix the zipper or the fly area. You drive up the 405 and you go from Op and Billabong to Hurley and O'Neill and Lost and Vulcan and Quiksilver, you know, just a block off the 405, one exit or another.
Roger Cooper>> As the surf industry scrambles to find new sources for foam blanks, two southern California firms have been ramping up production in an attempt to meet the demand. And shipments from overseas plants are beginning to arrive at docks. But will that be enough to send board prices back down?
Midget Smith>> I don't see that happening. The foam that is coming from overseas is even more expensive than the Clark is now and domestically produced foam is going to be pretty close to that, I'm afraid. So I think the prices have stabilized. I don't think they're going to go any higher, but they definitely won't go down.
Roger Cooper>> But what the surf industry does expect is to see innovation, making surfboards of new and different materials, something that didn't happen much when almost everybody bought foam from Clark.
Bill Stewart>> I think better products will come out of it because the door has been opened for research and development.
Roger Cooper>> And Register reporter, Shawn Price, looks for improved business practices.
Shawn Price>> I think simple market forces will take over. I think it's just capitalism at work. You'll see a better product. I think you'll see competitive pricing. It might go up a little bit, but I think the competition will keep boards affordable.
Robert Mignogna>> Shame on the surfing industry, myself included, that we all weren't prepared for it, but we became used to the great service and the great product that Clark put out and everybody in the industry was weaned on it, so we got sort of lulled into thinking that it could go on forever.
Roger Cooper>> There is one thing Orange County's surf industry doesn't have to worry about. It has a market that will never go away as long as there are people who live to surf like Charlie Fox.
Charlie Fox>> So it's just this complicated, complex madness that's truly a disease. I've come to grips that surfing is a disease and I'm affected by it and so are millions of others across this planet and I'm happy to be affected.
Roger Cooper>> What do they call it? Blank Monday?
Robert Mignogna>> (Laughter) Black Monday. But Blank Monday is a good alternative to Black Monday.
Roger Cooper>> In the end, most are predicting the fallout from Clark Foam's closing will actually be a positive thing once the laid-back world of surfing no longer revolves around a single supplier. In San Clemente, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.
Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
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