OSG 51V DD51
Iguazú Falls - View into the "Devil's Throat"
Nancy KwanNancy Kwan in Flower Drum Song (Henry Koster, 1961).
Chinese-American actress Nancy Kwan (1939) played a pivotal role in the acceptance of actors of Asian ancestry in major Hollywood film roles. She is best known for her debut as a free-spirited Hong Kong prostitute who captivates artist William Holden in The World of Suzie Wong (Richard Quine, 1960). She followed it the next year with the hit musical, Flower Drum Song (1961). Kwan spent the 1960s commuting between film roles in America and Europe.
Nancy Kwan Ka Shen (Chinese: 關家蒨) was born in Hong Kong in 1939 and grew up in Kowloon Tong. She is the daughter of Kwan Wing Hong, a Cantonese architect and Marquita Scott, a European model of English and Scottish ancestry. Kwan has an older brother, Ka Keung. In fear of the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong during World War II, Wing Hong, in the guise of a coolie, escaped from Hong Kong to North China in Christmas 1941 with his two children, whom he hid in wicker baskets. Kwan and her brother were transported by servants, evading Japanese sentries. They remained in exile in western China for five years until the war ended, after which they returned to Hong Kong and lived in a spacious, contemporary home her father designed. Scott escaped to England and never rejoined the family. Kwan's parents divorced when she was two years old. Her mother later moved to New York and married an American. Remaining in Hong Kong with the children, her father married a Chinese woman, whom Kwan called "Mother". Her father and her stepmother raised her, in addition to her brother and five half-brothers and half-sisters Five of Kwan's siblings became lawyers. Kwan attended the Catholic Maryknoll Convent School until she was 13 years old, after which she travelled to Kingsmoor School in Glossop, England a boarding school that her brother, Ka Keung, was then attending. Her brother studied to become an architect and she studied to become a dancer, soon also at the Royal Ballet School in London. Afterward, she travelled back to Hong Kong, where she started a ballet school. Stage producer Ray Stark posted an advertisement in the Hong Kong Tiger Standard (later renamed The Standard) regarding auditions for the character Suzie Wong for a play. Kwan was discovered by Stark in a film studio constructed by her architect father. After auditioning for Stark, she was asked to screen test to play a character in the film The World of Suzie Wong. Kwan did three screen tests, and a deadlock existed between whether to choose Kwan or France Nuyen, who played Suzie Wong on stage. Owing to Kwan's lack of acting experience, at Stark's request, she travelled to the United States, where she attended acting school in Hollywood and resided in the Hollywood Studio Club, a chaperoned dormitory, with other junior actresses. She later moved to New York. Kwan signed a seven-year contract with Stark's Seven Arts Productions at a beginning salary of $300 a week though she was not given a distinct role. When The World of Suzie Wong began to tour, Kwan was assigned the part of a bargirl. In addition to her small supporting character role, Kwan became an understudy for France Nuyen. Though Stark and the male lead William Holden preferred Kwan, despite her somewhat apprehensive demeanor during the screen test, she did not get the role. Paramount favored the eminent France Nuyen, who had been widely praised for her performance in the film South Pacific (1958) Stark acquiesced to Paramount's wishes. Nuyen received the role and Kwan later took the place of Nuyen on Broadway. In a September 1960 interview with Associated Press journalist Bob Thomas, she said, "I was bitterly disappointed, and I almost quit and went home when I didn't get the picture." In 1959, one month after Nuyen was selected for the film role and while Kwan was touring in Toronto, Stark told her to screen test again for the film. Nuyen, who was in an unstable relationship with Marlon Brando, had a nervous breakdown and was fired from the role because of her erratic actions. The film's director, Jean Negulesco, was fired and replaced by Richard Quine. Kwan began filming in London with co-star William Holden.
The World of Suzie Wong (Richard Quine, 1960) was a "box-office sensation". Critics lavished praise on Kwan for her performance. She was given the nickname "Chinese Bardot" for her unforgettable dance performance. Kwan and two other actresses, Ina Balin and Hayley Mills, were awarded the Golden Globe for the "Most Promising Newcomer–Female" in 1960. Scholar Jennifer Leah Chan of New York University wrote that Suzie provided an Asian actress—Kwan—with the most significant Hollywood role since actress Anna May Wong's success in the 1920s. Kwan was on the October 1960 cover of Life, cementing her status as an eminent sex symbol in the 1960s. In 1961, Nancy Kwan starred in Flower Drum Song (Henry Koster, 1961) in a related role. The film, based on the Broadway musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, was distinguished for being the first major Hollywood feature film with an all-Asian cast. It would be also the last film to do so for more than 30 years. Her prior ballet education provided a strong foundation for her role in Flower Drum Song, where she had much space to dance. After starring in The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song, Kwan's fame peaked in 1962. As a Hollywood icon, Kwan lived in a house atop Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. She commuted in a white British sports car and danced to Latin verses. The 22-years-old Kwan was dating Swiss actor Maximilian Schell. Kwan's success in her early career was not mirrored in later years, due to the cultural nature of 1960s America. Kwan had to journey to Europe and Hong Kong to escape the ethnic typecasting in Hollywood that confined her largely to Asian roles in spite of her Eurasian appearance. Her third film was the British drama The Main Attraction (Daniel Petrie, 1962) with Pat Boone. She played an Italian circus performer who was the love interest of Boone's character. While she was filming in the Austrian Alps, she met Peter Pock, a hotelier and ski teacher, with whom she immediately fell in love. After several weeks, the two married and resided in Innsbruck, Austria. Kwan later gave birth to Bernhard "Bernie" Pock. Her contract with Seven Arts led her to travel around the world to make films. In 1963, Kwan starred as the title character of the comedy Tamahine (Philip Leacock, 1963), opposite Dennis Price. She played an English-Tahitian ward of the headmaster at an old English public school. In the aviation disaster film Fate Is the Hunter (Ralph Nelson, 1964), her seventh film, Kwan played an ichthyologist opposite Glenn Ford. It was her first role as a Eurasian character. Kwan's roles were predominantly comic characters. She divorced Peter Pock in 1968. Kwan met Bruce Lee when he choreographed the martial arts moves in the spy comedy The Wrecking Crew (Phil Karlson, 1969), starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm. In Kwan's role in the film, she fought the character played by Sharon Tate by throwing a flying kick. Her martial arts move was based not on karate training, but on her dance foundation. In 2019, the film was referenced and briefly seen in Quentin Tarantino's film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which Tate is shown enjoying the film at the Fox Bruin Theater. She became close friends with Lee and met his wife and two children. In the 1970s, both Kwan and Lee returned to Hong Kong, where they carried on their companionship.
Nancy Kwan married Hollywood scriptwriter David Giler in July 1970 in a civil ceremony in Carson City, Nevada. That year, Kwan returned to Hong Kong with her son because her father was sick. She initially intended to remain for one year to assist him, but ultimately remained for about seven years. In 1972 she divorced Giler. She did not stop her work, starring as Dr. Sue in the action film Wonder Women (Robert Vincent O'Neil, 1973), Supercock (Gus Trikonis, 1975), and Fear/Night Creature (Lee Madden, 1978) with Donald Pleasance and Ross Hagen. The latter introduced her to filmmaker Norbert Meisel, who became her third husband. . While in Hong Kong, Kwan founded a production company, Nancy Kwan Films, which made dozens of commercials for the Southeast Asia market. In 1979, she returned to the United States, because Kwan wanted her son Bernie to finish his schooling there. There she played characters in the television series Fantasy Island (1978), Knots Landing (1984), and The A-Team (1986). In 1987, Nancy Kwan co-owned the dim sum restaurant, Joss. Kwan, producer Ray Stark, and restaurateur and Hong Kong film director Cecile Tang financed the restaurant, located on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. In 1993, Kwan played Gussie Yang, a tough-talking, soft-hearted Hong Kong restaurateur, in the fictional Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (Rob Cohen, 1993). starring Jason Scott Lee. She played a pivotal role in the film, a character based on Seattle restaurateur and political leader Ruby Chow who hires Bruce Lee as a dishwasher and gives him the funds to open a martial arts school. She also wrote, directed, and starred in a film about Eurasians, Loose Woman With No Face (Nancy Kwan, 1993). She was asked about whether she was confronted with racism as a leading Asian Hollywood actress in the 1960s. Kwan replied, "That was 30 years ago and (prejudice) wasn't such a heavy issue then. I was just in great Broadway productions that were turned into films. I personally never felt any racial problems in Hollywood." In the 1990s, she faced a severe shortage of strong roles. She attributed this to both her age and the movie enterprise's aversion to selecting Asians for non-Asian roles. In earlier years, she was able to play an Italian and a Tahitian. She passed on a role in The Joy Luck Club (1993) because the filmmakers refused to excise a line calling The World of Suzie Wong a "...horrible racist film". In 1993, Kwan co-starred in the two-character play Arthur and Leila about two siblings who struggle with their Chinese identities, and in 1994 she assumed the role of 52-year-old Martha in Singapore Repertory Theatre's showing of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' by Edward Albee. She and her husband produced the feature film Biker Poet. of which Bernie was the director and an actor. In 1996, when he was 33, Kwan's son, Bernie, died after contracting AIDS. Four years after his death, poet and actress Amber Tamblyn compiled her debut poetry book 'Of the Dawn' and dedicated it to Pock. She acted in the film Biker Poet with him when she was nine. Into the 1990s, Kwan appeared on television commercials and appeared in infomercials as the spokesperson for the cosmetic Oriental Pearl Cream. Kwan has been involved in philanthropy for AIDS awareness. In 1997, she published 'A Celebration of Life – Memories of My Son'. In 2006, Kwan reunited with Flower Drum Song co-star James Shigeta to perform A. R. Gurney's two-person play Love Letters. Kwan appeared in the documentary Hollywood Chinese (Arthur Dong, 2007). Kwan and her husband Norbert Meisel wrote, directed, and produced Ray of Sunshine (Norbert Meisel, 2007), a Bildungsroman film starring Cheyenne Rushing and with Kwan in a supporting role. Kwan wrote an introduction for the 2008 book 'For Goodness Sake: A Novel of the Afterlife of Suzie Wong' by James Clapp. During her career, Kwan has appeared in two television series and over 50 films. Kwan currently resides in Los Angeles and has family members in Hong Kong. She recently appeared in the feature Paint It Black (Amber Tamblyn, 2016), and the documentary Be Water (Bao Nguyen, 2020) about Bruce Lee.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards .
Cupola della Cappella Chigi a Santa Maria del Popolo, Roma
welcome to Piran! 🙂Piran is a town in southwestern Slovenia on the Gulf of Piran on the Adriatic Sea. The town is known for its medieval architecture, with narrow streets and compact houses and it's one of Slovenia's major tourist attractions. Architecture of Piran resembles the Italian Venice, to which it belonged in the past, together with Istria. Most of the buildings, as well as the medieval walls separating the city from the rest of the mainland, also come from this period. In the middle of the town is the Tartini Square, with a monument in memory of Giuseppe Tartini. Nearby are located various important buildings, such as Tartini’s house, first mentioned in 1384 and one of the oldest in town, the Municipal Palace. The area of Piran has been inhabited since ancient times. The name of the town most probably originates from the Greek "pyros", meaning fire, due to ancient lighthouses which were supposed to be on the edge of the marina. From 1283 to 1797, the town became part of the Republic of Venice and then was annexed to the Austrian Empire. In 1954 The town was annexed to Yugoslavia.
City walls - former defensive fortifications erected around the city. The first fortifications were built in the 7th century. Today you can see fortifications from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. Only the 200-meter-long walls with seven gates have survived. The walls are of uneven height because they were built in different periods - this shows how the architecture of defense has changed. This is one of the best viewpoints on the Old Town and the sea.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Widok na morze z murów miejskich w Piranie 🙂
Piran – miasto w Słowenii, siedziba gminy Piran, położone na skalistym cyplu, jest jednym z najatrakcyjniejszych turystycznie miejsc nad słoweńskim Adriatykiem, słynnym ze ze średniowiecznej architektury z wąskimi uliczkami i zwartą zabudową. Swą architekturą o przypomina włoską Wenecję, do której wraz z Istrią należało w przeszłości. Z tego okresu pochodzi też większość zabudowy, a także średniowieczne mury, oddzielające miasto od reszty lądu. Reprezentacyjny plac Tartiniego powstał pod koniec XIX wieku, po zasypaniu wewnętrznego basenu portowego (1894). Mieści się przy nim ratusz i budynek sądu oraz zachowana z obwarowań brama św. Jerzego. Obszar Piranu był zasiedlony od czasów antycznych, a nazwa miasta wywodzi się od greckiego "pyrá", oznaczającego ognisko, ponieważ na krańcu półwyspu zapalano ogień jako punkt orientacyjny dla statków płynących do portu Koper. W 1283 wraz z wybrzeżem Istrii Pitan przeszedł pod władzę Republiki Weneckiej, zaś po upadku potęgi Wenecji (1797) Piran przeszedł pod panowanie Habsburgów, zaś w 1954r. znalazł się w granicach Jugosławii.
Mury miejskie - dawne fortyfikacje obronne wzniesione wokół miasta. Pierwsze umocnienia zbudowano już w VII wieku. To, co można zobaczyć dzisiaj to fortyfikacje z przełomu XV i XVI wieku. Zachowały się jedynie mury o długości 200 metrów z siedmioma bramami. Mury mają nierówną wysokość, bo powstawały w różnych okresach – widać dzięki temu jak zmieniała się architektura obronna. To jeden z najlepszych punktów widokowych na położoną na cyplu starówkę.
240A#Christ of the Andes.// Cristo Redentor de Los Andes.
_DSC6317 copyen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ōwakudani
_DSC6314 copyen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ōwakudani
_DSC6313 copyen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ōwakudani
etc::Bill Ewing - "Hero of Day Care"www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-09-11-tm-2960-story....
The Hero of Day Care : Bill Ewing Has Built in Pomona a Child-Care Program Unmatched in Scope and Diversity
By DAVID DeVOSS
Sept. 11, 1988 12 AM PT
David DeVoss is a Times staff writer.
IT IS 7:30 a.m. in Pomona, and the morning dew still clings to the climbing bars and empty bike stands around Allison Elemen tary School. The school is silent, its doors still locked. Classes won’t begin for another hour.
But on one corner of the campus, at the Allison Children’s Center, more than a dozen children have already finished a breakfast of fruit, cereal and milk and are hard at play, building castle cities and frontier stockades out of Lego and Lincoln Logs. Many of them have been at the center since it opened at 6:30 a.m, and in an hour some will head for school, while others, preschoolers, will arrive to take their places, grabbing for spare jigsaw puzzles, making scratch-paper airplanes, watching TV cartoons or drifting into another room for a nap on a canvas cot.
Allison is one of 15 child-care centers in Pomona that serve 900 children in 12 different programs. Working mothers with babies head for Park West High School, where infants are cuddled and fed on demand by eight matronly attendants. Toddlers go to Trinity United Methodist Church. Preschoolers get a Montessori-based program at five locations around town (including Allison). Teen-age mothers take their children to a nursery next to the school where they study for high-school equivalency certificates. Six centers serve the 200 children enrolled in federally funded Head Start programs. There are programs for abused children and centers conveniently located near freeway on-ramps for commuter parents. One center, open until midnight, also offers care on weekends and holidays, and includes a mini-infirmary, complete with nurse, for children with non-contagious maladies. From 6 a.m. till midnight, seven days a week all year round, for children age 6 weeks to 14 years, Pomona offers some kind of child care.
In a state that leads the nation in public child-care programs, Pomona is tops. “California has a wider range of programs that are better financed and have higher operational standards than any other state,” says David Weikart, president of High / Scope, an Ypsilanti, Mich., foundation that studies the national effect of early childhood education. “It has improved licensing standards, raised teacher training requirements, and in places like Pomona instituted a truly quality program of child care.”
Anne Mitchell, co-director of the Public School Early Childhood Study, the first major investigation into the breadth and quality of public day care in America, agrees. “Pomona child care is extraordinary compared to the rest of the country,” she says. “A few enterprising districts try to approach what Pomona does, but they don’t even come close.”
Nationally and statewide, what sets the Pomona system apart is its scope and diversity. The L.A. child-care system may serve more children and wield a larger budget, but it offers only five programs to Pomona’s 12. Riverside County’s Office of Education equals Pomona in number of programs, but it can’t match it in diversity. Berkeley, like Pomona, has a center for the mildly ill, but doesn’t offer evening child care. Albany has special-education classes for preschoolers, but has no respite care for abused children, and all its facilities close on weekends. And so on through the state.
“We do a $320-million business with 900 agencies throughout California, and I can say without reservation that Pomona is our exemplary model of how children should be served,” says Dr. Robert Cervantes, director of the state Department of Education’s child-development division. “Pomona represents the optimum of what can be done in child care in California.”
Like all the top programs nationally, Pomona spends more than the average per child ($4,500 as against $3,000), it pays its staff members well ($26,000 a year against a national average of $9,000 a year), it hires specially trained teachers (an early-childhood credential is a requirement), it has low staff turnover rates (a majority have been there for a decade; nationally, child-care workers have a 42% turnover rate, the highest of any occupation listed by the Labor Department), and it consistently scores high on state quality evaluations.
The school board in Pomona is justifiably proud of the system it sponsors. “Child care benefits the community as a whole,” asserts Nancy J. McCracken, a member of the board for the past six years. She can explain the secret of Pomona’s day-care success. “The creation and expansion of our child-care network, “ she says, “has resulted, in large measure, from the imagination and financial ability of one man, Bill Ewing.”
AT FIRST glance, Bill Ewing seems an unlikely hero of day care or anything else. He is a slightly balding 52-year-old stamp collector with a mellow Southern drawl, and his entire being bespeaks moderation. In meetings and memos he seldom implores and never insists. Indeed, the only time he raises his voice is to sing tenor solos for the Ontario United Methodist Church choir. Yet for the past 17 years as administrator of Pomona’s child-development programs, he has been California’s child-care champion.
The son of a paper-mill worker, Bill Ewing grew up poor in West Monroe, La. His parents were staunch Southern Baptists who spent Wednesday evenings and most of Sunday at church, singing hymns and churning the torpid air with hand-held fans donated by a local funeral home.
Driven by the image of his father working long hours in the 120-degree heat of a pulp mill, Ewing decided to become a teacher while studying at Northeast Louisiana State College. “The baby boom had caused a national shortage of teachers at every level of education,” he recalls. “Teaching offered upward mobility, the opportunity to go anywhere and insurance against ever having to work in the pulp mill.”
Still, after he received his BA in education in 1959, Ewing followed his first impulse: to go into social work. The summer following his graduation, he roamed the cane fields of St. Mary’s Parish in south Louisiana, processing disability claims and expediting welfare checks. For a young man who had “grown up in the church,” it was satisfying work.
But the lure of teaching, and the higher salaries it offered, remained strong. When Freeport Nickel Co. in New Orleans offered him a job teaching fourth grade at its Moa Bay Mining subsidiary in Cuba the following au tumn, Ewing and his 18-year-old wife, Becky, didn’t hesitate. “The $400-a-month salary was almost twice what I could earn in Louisiana,” he remembers. “We got a free week in New Orleans and five nights at the Hotel Nacional in Havana.”
The excitement of revolutionary Cuba quickly dissipated when Ewing arrived on Cuba’s Atlantic coast. Surrounded by jungle and besieged by swarms of biting midges, the company school had only five fourth-graders. When Fidel Castro nationalized the $90-million mine six months later, Ewing returned to the United States and accepted a teaching job in Roswell, N.M. The next year, he moved to Belridge, a tiny district with one school 40 miles west of Bakersfield. “My third-grade class had 18 wonderful students, but after commuting through tule fog for two years it was time to move on,” Ewing says. His new destination was Pomona. In 1964, he got an assignment there teaching children with learning disabilities.
After three years in special education, Ewing returned to the elementary classroom as a social-science and music instructor. At Montvue Elementary School, he introduced his students to operettas such as “Hansel and Gretel” and sponsored an evening astronomy class. When Apollo astronauts began advancing toward the moon in 1969, Ewing and 40 fifth-graders followed their progress through a telescope he persuaded the PTA to buy.
Ewing’s enthusiasm made him popular with students and their parents. His efforts as Montvue’s representative for the Pomona teachers’ association made him a favorite among his peers. Ewing wasn’t sure how he rated with the school administration. In the spring of 1968, after carefully making sure he had tenure and a contract for the following year, he had stood up at a board meeting and publicly complained that administrators were consuming money that could be better spent in the classroom.
Then in 1971, he decided he’d like to try an administrative position himself. The job of child-development supervisor opened, and Ewing applied. His superiors were surprised that he wanted a job they all deemed “women’s work.” It would be a nightmare of distraught parents, pinkeye and runny noses, they told him. The big event of your day, they chortled, would be the afternoon nap. But the job appealed to the same combination of ambition, career pragmatism and latent social-work tendencies that had carried him from Cuba to California in the first place.
“I saw myself as a leader in education and realized that child care was a great opportunity,” Ewing says. “Sacramento seemed ready to fund more (child-care) programs. With half of the women in America already working outside the home, it was a field that was bound to grow.”
When Ewing took charge of Pomona’s $65,000 child-development budget in November, 1971, the city had one center serving 53 disadvantaged children. His office in the Pomona Children’s Center on Main Street was only slightly larger than a jail cell. His duties included mopping floors, dispensing Band-Aids and monitoring the playground. Yet the more time Ewing spent with the children and their parents, the more certain he became that he had finally found his niche.
“Up until then I’d seen middle-class families once a semester on parents’ night,” Ewing says. “I’d never come into contact with child abuse. I couldn’t imagine a parent would sexually molest his child. Yet here I was dealing on a daily basis with children who were hungry, unwashed and often terribly afraid.
“Their parents were incredibly angry, and not without justification. Their lives were going nowhere. Their kids had medical and other social needs that they couldn’t provide. There was no way to avoid becoming emotionally involved. Once the children had a little food and a bath their vitality would blossom. They had an innocence, a spontaneity, that cried out for protection. I remember standing in the middle of a room crowded with preschoolers, overwhelmed by their excitement. At that moment I knew that if I could improve their quality of life, the entire community would benefit.”
Ewing’s immersion in the Pomona Children’s Center produced an epiphany of sorts. He could no longer accept the Pomona school superintendent’s goal of expanding child care gradually with whatever money the state would allow. “I had a vision that quality child care should be available to every parent in need,” Ewing says. “There would be a nursery for babies, a sick bay for the ill, and after-school centers where teen-agers could socialize. My staff would be highly trained, well-paid and bilingual if possible. Everything depended on finding teachers who loved children and were fascinated by their development.”
At the end of each day, after the parents had come for their children and his four female staffers had gone home, Ewing began to study the laws and pending legislation relating to child care. To his delight, he discovered that thousands of dollars were available to districts that submitted credible proposals. He could apply for state money to create programs, then use budget increases to expand them. In 1972, he requested and was given money that allowed the district’s one center to begin staying open evenings. The following year, he opened California’s first state-subsidized infant-care center with $60,000 from California’s General Child Development Fund. Designed to serve single mothers unable to stay home after their babies were born, the nursery became a model in the state for others that followed.
By the end of 1973, Ewing’s programs were caring for 125 children with a budget three times the size of the one he had inherited. But despite this expansion, Pomona still served only 10% of the families in need. For every child admitted into day care, nine others had to be placed on the waiting list. The problem, Ewing had begun to realize, was not lack of state funds, but the way state funds were distributed.
Every time the state put more money into existing child-care programs, the Department of Education’s Child Development Unit distributed that money by increasing each school district’s budget by an equal, fixed percentage. The system helped big-budget districts in Long Beach, Los Angeles and Pasadena whose child-care programs--and funding base--dated back to World War II. But it hurt districts like Pomona that were just getting into child care. Ewing wanted to make demographics a factor in funding, otherwise the relative inequity would continue. So he set about constructing a strategy.
“Sacramento seemed willing to consider a new policy, but I had to be careful not to offend anybody,” Ewing says. “An outright attack on established districts would prompt a negative response. I had to write a position paper that called for change in a positive way.”
Armed with census reports and school-district surveys, Ewing began to compose his arguments in early 1974. He did not challenge the districts with long-established child-development programs directly. Rather, he argued on behalf of the children of California whose needs could not be satisfied until declining family incomes, impoverished single parents, teen-age pregnancy and local inflation became factors in the funding process. He scribbled notes on legal pads at night, and Becky retyped them the following morning. During the afternoon nap at the center, he lobbied colleagues from the California Child Development Administrators Assn. via telephone. His argument in favor of demographic-based funding finally emerged in the form of a four-page proposal for a plan he called General Expansion by Competition.
“How could people argue with a competitive process in which everyone had equal footing?” Ewing says. Indeed, nobody could, and later that year Sacramento decided to distribute new money to existing child-development programs based on statistically proven need. And Ewing had learned to get what he wanted. He was on his way to becoming a master of the bureaucracy.
The expansion his proposal brought to Pomona caused an unexpected problem. As the number of children in the system grew, it became apparent that the staff couldn’t care for more than a few children older than 15 months in the infant center: The toddlers were too rambunctious. And their lack of toilet training and inability to feed themselves made them unwelcome in rooms reserved for preschoolers. Ewing wanted a special center for toddlers, but once again the rules wouldn’t allow it. State programs were clustered in categories to serve either infants, preschoolers or school-age children. There was no category for toddlers, and thus no money could be specifically allotted for them.
“I had 20 toddlers and no place to put them,” Ewing remembers with a smile. “If I wanted extra funds, I had to propose something innovative.”
So Ewing suggested that the state create a new category to serve the needs of toddlers. And as its first program, he suggested starting a “toddler transition” center in Pomona that would allow groups of children 15 to 30 months old to gradually acquire the developmental skills they’d need as preschoolers. The Department of Education rewarded the idea with a $40,000 grant.
Throughout the early 1970s, a majority of the school board approved additions to Pomona’s network of children’s centers. Ewing and all his ideas had first to pass the board’s scrutiny before they made it to the state. By the beginning of 1976, he was administering a $450,000 program that cared for more than 200 children. He didn’t hit a snag until that summer.
Ewing proposed that Pomona use $175,000 in state money to multiply the number of child-care sites in the city by incorporating private family day-care homes into the system. Several members who had assented to his earlier plans opposed this one, insisting that it would be far more difficult to regulate care in private homes than to control the district centers.
“Public education is getting into everything,” school trustee Don Donnelly complained during one heated debate in July, 1976. “Next you’ll be asking us to get into prenatal care.”
“But the need is so great in Pomona,” Ewing responded. “Most of the people this will help are single parents.”
“Then they should assume their family obligation,” Donnelly said, voicing the majority sentiment. “This thing allows people to cop out on the responsibilities of parenthood.”
It was his first and only defeat.
As the years passed and women began to replace men on Pomona’s school board, the enthusiasm for child care began to grow. “The board didn’t realize initially how savvy Ewing was,” Donnelly remembers. “We just looked at child care and thought, ‘This isn’t education.’ It’s hard to appreciate the value of something like child care when you never give it a chance.”
Donnelly, now a firefighter for L.A. County, eventually became one of Ewing’s strongest backers. “I finally realized the challenge was not to get students into college but to achieve basic literacy. I’d hate to think what the town would be like today without day care.”
FOR THE families in Pomona who use the day-care system created by Ewing, how he did it doesn’t really matter. Only that he has succeeded. Since that moment of failure in 1976, Ewing has added money, programs and families to his system. He now serves 20% of the families in need (with a waiting list of 1,000 children) in Pomona with a $3.5 million budget. He has set up a telephone information system that provides a one-stop day-care referral system that extends far beyond Pomona. More than 7,000 people from La Puente to Rancho Cucamonga used it last year alone. In 1986, he finally got his private-home day-care alternative added to the menu: Using an idea much like Vice President George Bush’s day-care campaign proposal (see box on Page 12), he offers state money vouchers to parents in western San Bernardino County who want to use private day care. He has found ways to incorporate middle-class families in a system primarily designed for the needy.
With every new program, the system has been carefully integrated with the rest of Pomona’s human services. Welfare recipients looking for employment receive free day care. So do impoverished parents enrolled in the district’s adult-education courses. When Pomona Unified decided to offer English classes to newly arrived immigrants, it was only natural that the classes be given in temporary structures alongside a mid-town day-care facility.
For Gilbert Galindo, day care is the ticket to a better job. Three years ago, he and his wife, Irma, were unemployed. Neither had marketable skills. Irma Galindo felt that they were “going nowhere.”
In 1985, while waiting for his welfare application to be approved, Galindo met a social worker who suggested that he improve his office skills through adult-education courses offered by Pomona Unified. Irma decided to enroll, as well, to obtain a high-school equivalency certificate. But it was almost impossible for the couple to attend classes and look for new jobs while caring for their four children. Finding child-care space at Madison Children’s Center in mid-town Pomona solved their problem. Both began studying business administration, and now Irma is a trainee for Sumitomo Bank while her husband is studying accounting in college.
The Galindos’ daughter and three sons go to the Madison Children’s Center every afternoon after school. They receive a snack, finish their homework and then at 4 p.m., their parents, both in school since 10 a.m., pick them up.
“Both of us have a lot more confidence now and are sure we’ll find better jobs than before,” Galindo says.
“I know our kids are happier,” his wife adds. “They used to never want to leave the house. Now they never want to come home.”
The Worcesters, middle-class Pomona-L.A. commuters, use a special program created in 1983 that allows them into the child-care system for a reasonable fee.
“Before the center opened, our family was under incredible stress,” says Roslyn Worcester, a Los Angeles-based credit analyst with Republic Factors Corp. “We seemed to be working just to support the baby-sitter. Because of the traffic, it was almost impossible to maintain a career and still have quality time with the children.”
Now Worcester or her husband, who also works in downtown Los Angeles with a discount stock brokerage, drop their son Kenny and daughter Michelle off at the Diamond Bar school at 6:30 a.m., two hours before school begins. They pick them up at 6 p.m., two hours after school is dismissed.
“Having child care available at the school is very important to me,” Worcester explains. “My daughter Michelle is very cute and can be flirtatious. I don’t want her waiting on the corner for a bus. Both children feel comfortable at the center, which they regard as an extension of their home.”
But most of the programs in the Pomona system concentrate on more basic services than latchkey centers. “The first thing we teach a child is how to clean himself,” says Mary Carrey, head teacher at the Madison Children’s Center. “Kids who never get bathed at home are washed here in the basin. We hope that once we teach the child, he then can train the mother.”
Inside the entrance of the Madison center is a bulletin board full of announcements for English lessons offered by a nearby church, a used-clothing exchange and a family crisis center. On the opposite wall, a series of simply drawn cartoons illustrate themes such as “Don’t leave children in locked cars,” “It’s safe to trust the police” and “Even poor children have the ability to learn.”
The most poignant message is perhaps the most important. It comes in the form of a poem affixed to the wall beside the basin where children are scrubbed.
A careful parent I ought to be,
For little children follow me.
I do not dare to go astray,
For fear they’ll go the self-same way.
The simple rhyme has a special meaning for Pam Sekhon. By the time she left her first husband in 1983, Sekhon had two children and a chronic drinking problem. One afternoon, a Pomona social worker arrived to find out whether she was supervising her children properly.
“I told the woman from Children’s Services that I was exhausted and needed a break,” she remembers. “When I wasn’t working or taking care of the kids I seemed to spend all of my time trying to find baby-sitters. I was desperate for child care.”
Sekhon finally got the help she needed in 1984 when a Superior Court judge placed her young son and daughter in a Pomona day-care center administered by the Pomona Unified School District. Some may have considered the court referral a rebuke, but for Sekhon it was “the miracle” that allowed her to begin building a better future.
Sekhon explains the real success of Bill Ewing: “For the first time in my life someone had actually given me something. It was an unselfish act for which I’ll always be thankful.”
Today, Sekhon’s 18-month-old daughter spends the day at an infant center near the Pomona Fairgrounds. Her two older children eat supper and spend part of the evening at Emerson Children’s Center. Sekhon, 30, is once again looking for a job. But now she can job-hunt during the day and attend a thrice-weekly alcohol and drug dependence program at night because her children are being cared for by the Pomona school system.
“Two wonderful things have enriched my life,” she says. “My kids are the first. The second is affordable child care.”
WHAT CAN BE called the nerve center of Pomona’s child care empire is an unpretentious frame house behind the Pilgrim Congregational Church in downtown Pomona. Here in a tiny back room decorated with preschool finger paintings and jammed tight with file cabinets, Bill Ewing spends 10 hours a day supervising his child-care empire and a staff of 130.
His weekly calendar, as detailed as that of any corporate attorney, reveals days spent negotiating state contracts, renewing leases and rewriting parent handbooks. Personnel matters and meetings with local principals fill spaces in the schedule.
The bureaucratic, methodical work seldom lends itself to high drama, Ewing concedes. But angry parents and playground accidents provide a few moments of excitement.
“Last Friday, the police called and said a suicidal parent with a loaded shotgun was on his way to Emerson Junior High to pick up his daughter,” Ewing says. “I went over and dismissed the staff, then stayed until their parents picked them up.” When all but one had finally been claimed, he took the child back to his office and went back to writing the proposals that bring new day-care money to Pomona.
His goal isn’t compelling prose, but concise appeals to bureaucratic logic. It’s one of his best skills. Department of Education officials say Pomona’s child-care network results in large measure from Ewing’s ability to communicate his development concepts. “Some proposals look as though they were scribbled in a phone booth with a dull pencil,” confides one Sacramento administrator. “Many are padded with totally irrelevant information or blanketed with letters from local politicians. How can you trust a person to supervise a child-care budget when he can’t even write a logical paragraph?” The penalties for bad writing can be extreme. The failure to bring in new money can quickly cripple a child-care program, as it has in Marin County, and Stockton and Redlands.
Pomona’s day-care system survives and improves not just because of proposal writing, but also because of guile and budget wizardry. After a new day-care contract with the state is signed, Ewing cajoles Pomona Unified into providing classroom space, utilities and custodial service. Then, armed with these expressions of local support, he returns to Sacramento to leverage additional money from the state. In an era of tight budgets, every dollar helps.
“The money I receive from the state does not always cover the cost of a program,” Ewing explains. “The amount I receive for each preschooler--$18.81 a day--is enough to break even. But infant care that costs me between $30 to $35 is reimbursed by the state at $26 per day. My infant center would need $9,000 a year for each baby to break even. Obviously, the state will not give me that much money. By shifting money from school-age programs where expenses are lower, I can keep the infant centers open.”
In an effort to make its child-care programs more efficient, California’s child-development division in the spring of 1986 told school districts and other public providers that they could sell unused space in their state-subsidized latchkey centers at prevailing commercial rates. The new regulation meant that a district with 65 subsidized children in a program with a capacity of 80 could sell the 15 unused spaces.
The amount a district could charge was determined by the amount the state paid for similar space. In Pomona, for example, it meant that Bill Ewing could charge a middle-class parent $67.50 a week for full-time latchkey care since that was the amount the state paid to maintain a child from an impoverished family. The rule sounded logical, and worked in Pomona, which had the foresight to place its latchkey centers in middle-class neighborhoods where $67.50 a week was close to the prevailing commercial rate. But in districts such as Pacoima, Bellflower and Compton, spaces went begging because a weekly fee of $67 was far above the commercial rate, far in excess of what families could afford to pay.
Local administrators and officials in Sacramento realized that the rule needed changing, but neither could see a way around California’s Constitution, which prohibits using public funds to subsidize those who don’t qualify for public assistance.
Once more, Ewing was able to see the big picture. “It was November of 1987 and I was in the middle of a latchkey meeting in Sacramento when I realized we would never be able to compete with the private sector in low-income areas,” Ewing remembers. “It was like a light bulb suddenly came on. I stood up and said we’d made a big mistake in failing to take our administrative costs into account. Fifteen percent of that $67 went for administrative costs. Non-subsidized children didn’t require all that paper work. If we charged these children 15% less--the actual cost of their program--we could be more competitive with private child care.”
To the delight of the Department of Education and California’s child-development administrators, Ewing set about doing what he does better than anyone: writing a position paper that could allow an expansion of child-care services. As in the past, he framed the debate in a way that makes it hard to disagree with his logic. He does not propose that the rate currently demanded by the state be lowered. Instead, Ewing proposes that “families not eligible for state subsidy may be enrolled at the actual cost of services they receive.”
And he carefully defines what full cost really means.
“The effect of Bill’s proposal would be to open California’s child care to the middle class,” says Cervantes of the Department of Education’s child-development division. “Districts won’t make money by selling these empty spaces. But resolving this legal issue will allow us to deliver more child care. By making these unused slots available we can serve from 5,000 to 10,000 more children. Bill has come up with a practical solution by which we can resolve this comparability problem immediately.”
Whatever the state decides, Ewing will undoubtedly insist that still more needs to be done. His next program, if he can find the money, is 24-hour-a-day child care. The problem with expanding the frontiers of child care, Ewing admits, is that you constantly need more funds to pay the bills. “That’s why,” he says with a wink, “whenever I hear that new money is available, I try to be the first person in line.”
2025 Bid Calling Contest | Jan. 8, 2025
2025 Bid Calling Contest | Jan. 8, 2025
seven brothers
Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, PolandDetails best viewed in Original Size .
The Palace of Culture and Science is a notable high-rise building in central Warsaw. With a total height of 778 feet (237 m), it is the second tallest building in both Warsaw and Poland (after the Varso Tower), the sixth tallest building in the European Union and one of the tallest on the European continent. At the time of its completion in 1955, the Palace was the eighth tallest building in the world, retaining the position until 1961; it was also briefly the tallest clock tower in the world, from 2000 until the 2002 installation of a clock mechanism on the NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building in Tokyo, Japan. Motivated by Polish historical architecture and American art deco high-rise buildings, the Palace of Culture and Science was designed by Soviet-Russian architect Lev Rudnev in "Seven Sisters" style. The Palace houses various public and cultural institutions such as theatres, cinemas, libraries, university faculties and authorities of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Surrounding the building are a collection of sculptures representing figures of the fields of culture and science, with the main entrance featuring sculptures of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, by Ludwika Nitschowa, and Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, by Stanisław Horno-Popławski. Since 2007, the Palace of Culture and Science has been enlisted in the Registry of Objects of Cultural Heritage.
Additional information on the Holy Cross Roman Catholic Minor Basilica, Warsaw may be obtained at Wikipedia .
It Must be January!
Bust of Ivan Pavlov on the Avenue of Scientists, Main Building of Moscow State University, Sparrow Hills, Moscow, Russia
Bust of Ivan Pavlov on the Avenue of Scientists, Main Building of Moscow State University, Sparrow Hills, Moscow, Russia
Bust of Dmitri Mendeleev on the Avenue of Scientists, Main Building of Moscow State University, Sparrow Hills, Moscow, Russia
Love the Outdoors
Main building of Moscow State University (MSU), an iconic Stalinist building in Sparrow Hills, Moscow, Russia
Seaford Head Cliffs
50528 - SF74YNO (Scottish Citylink)
50526 - SF74YNM (Scottish Citylink)
Majestic Hells Canyon Waterscape Art by Kaylyn Franks Photography
Mandraki Harbour entrance, Rhodes
