Bergman in front of Korphe School, Pakistan. 1996. PHOTO COURTESY OF CENTRAL ASIA INSTITUTE

By Lauren Tyler
FEATURES EDITOR

Winter came early in the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan during October of 1996. In the skies of this remote region of the world, a Russian MI-17 helicopter, equipped with plastic lawn chairs as seats, maneuvered towards Korphe village, in the northern region of Baltistan.

For City College librarian Julia Bergman and nine other foreigners on board of the helicopter, this was the last stop of their six-week long trip through Central Asia.

“We were flying over the most amazing landscape…crystal-clear blue skies and the turquoise Indus river,” Bergman said. “The Karakoram Mountain contain the highest concentration of high peaks in the world, it’s simply shocking.”

The pilot landed the helicopter in a valley. The mountaineer asked if anyone wanted to visit a village and when Bergman asked if it was appropriate for her to go, a group member with mountaineering experience assured her it was fine. Bergman made her ascension up an arduous, rocky trail.

As they got closer to the top they heard the voices of children. “All of a sudden we were surrounded by a dozen adolescent boys,” Bergman said.

Greg Mortenson with students at Sitara school, Wakhan corridor, Afghanistan. PHOTO COURTESY OF CENTRAL ASIA INSTITUTE

The boys questioned where Bergman was from. “I said I was from the United States — that wasn’t good enough. So I said I am from California and that wasn’t good enough either. So then I said I am from San Francisco. They put their hands on me and started leading me back down the trail.”

They were leading her back to the valley where a sign, literally and figuratively, would forever change her.

“On the far edge of this open area there’s a metal sign and it reads ‘The American Himalayan Organization, San Francisco, California. Thank you Jean Hoerni,’” Bergman said.

Hoerni was Bergman’s cousin, Jennifer Wilson’s, husband. The renowned Swiss-born physicist made much of his fortune in the Silicon Valley, but was also an avid mountaineer when he was younger. Based on his own travels through the Karakoram Mountains, he had acquired a fondness for the area and donated thousands to build schools in the region.

Bergman remembered, “before I had left that July…he had given money to build a school.” She also recalled Hoerni talking about a bridge over a mighty river leading to a school on top of a mountain. She asked the boys if those things were there, and they were.

“I am neither religious or spiritual. I am rather pragmatic, but I got so emotional, I started to cry,” she said.

The experience left a lasting impression on Bergman — in 2003 she became the chair of the board of directors of the Central Asia Institute.

When Bergman returned to San Francisco in mid-November of 1996 she immediately picked up the phone and called her cousin. The phone rang but nobody answered. Two hours later, Bergman’s cousin Jennifer Wilson called her back.

“Where have you been?” Wilson asked.

“I just got home a couple of hours ago,” Bergman said. Wilson explained that she and Hoerni were visiting San Francisco from their home in Seattle because Hoerni needed a blood transfusion. Bergman asked Wilson to put Hoerni on the phone. “Jean, I saw the Korphe school,” she said. “No?” Hoerni gasped.

The writing on the bathroom mirror in Mortenson’s home in Bozeman, Mont. reads, “When your heart speaks, take good notes.” His heart spoke to him when he attempted to climb K2 in Baltistan, Pakistan, which, at 8,611 meters, is the world’s second highest mountain.

Greg Mortenson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-author of New York Times bestseller “Three Cups of Tea,” spoke at City College on March 4, on account of his work as co-founder and executive director of CAI, an organization which has built 78 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, primarily for girls.

He grew up near Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, where his parents developed a teaching hospital and an international school, and had always taken well to climbing.

Climbing K2 was much more sentimental to Mortenson. His sister Christa, whom he loved tenderly, had died at the age of 23 from a severe epileptic attack. In her honor, Mortenson wanted to place Christa’s amber necklace at the peak of K2.

While he attempted to climb K-2 he encountered a theme he would become readily familiar with what he considered failure.

“Failure”, the title of the first chapter in Mortenson’s book “Three Cups of Tea.” To him, failure meant “not the end of the road, but its a way to grow and find a different path.”

Greg Mortenson, co-founder of the Central Asia Institute and Julia Bergman, retired librarian discuss his book Three Cups of Tea outside the Diego Rivera Theatre on March 4, 2009. RAMSEY EL-QARE / THE GUARDSMAN

On his journey, after having been lost for days, emaciated and not bathing for nearly three months. Mortenson found a path - it was the path leading to Korphe Village. Haji Ali, the village nurmadhar — village chief — stood placidly at the edge of the village.

He welcomed Mortenson graciously, which is an important tradition in Baltistan culture. Haji Ali and the villagers nursed him back to health. It was then that Mortenson had his first three cups of tea.

As a trauma nurse, Mortenson was able to mend wounds and set bones, a luxury previously missing from the villager’s life. The angrezi, or strange white man, soon acquired the name Dr. Greg.

One day, with Haji Ali standing beside him, Mortenson looked over the ledge to the valley. He saw 84 school children without a teacher copying multiplication tables in the sand with sticks.

“A girl in the village came up to me and asked, ‘can you help us build a school?’ I promised her I would,” Mortenson said.

After consulting with experts on the area, Mortenson realized he needed $12,000 to build the school.

Upon his return to Berkeley, Calif., he began his quest for funding. He hand-wrote 580 letters, but of all the “Dear Mr. Michael Jordan and Dear Mr. Sylvester Stallone” letters, Mortenson only received one check from Tom Brokaw for $100.

As he was walking through the dismal fog on his way to a graveyard shift at the University of California Hospital, Mortenson felt that his hope was dampened.

His mother suggested he fly to River Falls, Wis., where she was the principal of Westside Elementary school. Timidly, her son spoke to the students about the children in Baltistan and his desire to build a school there.

“A fourth grader named Jeffrey came and said ‘I have a piggy bank and I want to help you,’” Mortenson said. Six weeks later, Westside Elementary raised 62,340 pennies. This was the beginning of Pennies for Peace, a fund raising effort 3,400 schools nationwide are now involved in.

“The irony is that movie stars and adults didn’t help, it was the children,” Mortenson said.

With meager capital and all of his belongings sold, Mortenson was frustrated but fastidious. Tom Vaughan, a fellow mountaineer and doctor at UCSF, had listened to Mortenson’s troubles. One morning, Vaughan handed him a prescription pad with the name and number of Jean Hoerni, who had read an article about Mortenson.

Mortenson called Hoerni, who immediately asked whether Mortenson would run off with his money if he were to give it. Mortenson said he simply wanted to educate children and said he needed $12,000.

“You’re not bulls—ing? You can really build your school for 12 grand?’’ asked Hoerni. “Yes, sir,” Mortenson humbly replied.

The money was transferred and CAI was born. Months and checks later, Hoerni died on January 12, 1997. In his will he left Mortenson $22,315 along with an endowment of nearly one million dollars for CAI.

Mortenson spoke at Hoerni’s memorial service at Stanford University Chapel.

“The last person who got up to speak talked about Baltistan. It was the most emotional speech. Of course this was Greg Mortenson,” Bergman said.

She approached Mortenson and said that she had seen the Korphe school. “You’re the blonde in the helicopter,” he said. Bergman told him about her impression of the school and said she wanted to help.

“Well, I want to build a library,” Mortenson said.

“I’m a librarian,” Bergman said matter-of-factly. “I was the token educator. Teacher training became my fixation.”

Originally, most CAI board members were mountaineers. Bergman changed that structure and began introducing more educators.

She inducted three City College faculty members. Abdul Jabbar, an English and interdisciplinary studies professor and ESL instructors Joy Durighello and Bob Irwin. Jabbar is a member of the board. Irwin and Durighello assisted with teacher training and wrote the Balti Handbook.

The official languages of Pakistan are Urdu and English. Through the use of English the Balti Handbook was developed. “We developed exercises in reading, writing and comprehension. We wrote it as we were teaching” Durighello said.

“Half of our organization is from City College,” Mortenson said on March 4 at the Diego Rivera theater. More importantly, he discussed the pertinence of CAI and its influence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“It took three years to build one school, now we have 78,” Mortenson said. “The more I do this, the more I am convinced that global literacy should be our top priority.”

Pakistan and Afghanistan are continuously in tumultuous states. Insurgents from the Taliban and al-Qaida continue to mar any progress, especially in regards to education for girls. The Taliban, for example, bans education for females, according “Journey of Hope,” a CAI publication.

“Jihad is really a spiritual quest. A boy has to get his mother’s permission to go. If she is educated she’s not going to let him go. People want to find ways to create peace…its literacy, its educating women,” Bergman said.

“We can drop bombs, or build roads or hand out condoms. But unless the girls are educated, the societies won’t change,” Mortenson said.

Mortenson demonstrated to the audience that in 2000 only 800,000 students were enrolled in school in Pakistan. The majority were boys, ages 5-15. In 2008 that number exploded to 7.2 million students, two million of those girls.

“Their [extremist groups] biggest fear is not the bullet, its the pen,” Mortenson said. “The real enemy that we’re fighting is ignorance. It’s ignorance that breeds hatred.”

While meeting with General David Petraeus and Admiral Michael Mullen of the United States Central Command Mortenson came to an important realization. “They all said there’s no military solution in Afghanistan. They say education is the key,” he said.

“Three Cups of Tea” is now required reading for counterintelligence training and for U.S. special forces about to be deployed to Afghanistan.

CAI continues its mission, from its board members in San Francisco and its staff members in Bozeman, Mont. to promote peace “one school at a time.”

The Guardsman editors Bonta Hill and Aaron Turner will be covering the Rams’ competition in the state basketball championship, held in Fresno, Calif.

LINK: Men’s state bracket

LINK: Women’s state bracket

(state brackets from http://www.coasports.org)

Follow The Guardsman’s City College sports coverage on Twitter via ccsfsports for live City College sports coverage on Twitter!

By Christina R. Hernandez
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Acción Latina, a San Francisco non-profit organization, is developing a multimedia project chronicling the history of the Latino press in the United States. The initial film is expected to be finished this year to commemorate the bicentennial of El Misisipi, the first Spanish-language newspaper in the U.S.

“Voices for Justice: The Enduring Legacy of the Latino Press in the U.S.,” will also include an interactive Web site based at University of Houston’s Arte Público Press and a companion book.
Working on the project are Juan Gonzales, Dr. Félix F. Gutiérrez, Dr. Nicolás Kanellos, Raymond Telles, Eva Martínez and Jon Funabiki.

Gonzales, the committee director, is the department chair of journalism at City College and founding editor of the Mission district’s bilingual biweekly newspaper, El Tecolote.  He is also a member of the Journalism Association of Community Colleges, the San Francisco Newspaper Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

“The roots of my curiosity started when I was a junior at San Francisco State, taking a class on journalism history in America,” Gonzales said. “It was all white men highlighted as pioneers in the industry.”

Motivated to learn about the Latino press, he went to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
“Further research showed that there were even some Spanish language newspapers in San Francisco,” Gonzales said.

He encountered another El Tecolote, a San Francisco daily newspaper which was first published  in 1875.

“That experience kind of charged me up … [I thought] if there’s this much, just imagine what we don’t know,” Gonzales said. He did more research and began incorporating it into his classes. “Around 1995, I became aware there were more people doing what I was doing.”
Stanley Nelson’s film “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords” released in 1999, documented the history of the Black press in the United States.

“When African-Americans did ‘Soldiers Without Swords,’ I thought we should do our own,” Gonzales said.

As the bicentennial of El Misisipí approached, Gonzales decided it was time to put together a committee and get the project started.

“Juan gave me a call in the summer of 2006,” Gutiérrez said. “He’s the one who got this thing started.”

Gutiérrez, named the Padrino (Godfather) of Latino journalists by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 1995, is a professor of journalism and communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. He has written extensively about diversity in the media.

He rediscovered and identified El Misisipí, which was founded in New Orleans on Sept. 7, 1808,  as the country’s first Spanish language newspaper in 1977.

To work full-time on the project, Gonzales and Gutiérrez both took a sabbatical from teaching in fall 2008.

“We’ve been meeting for about a year and a half, every two weeks to plan and coordinate our efforts to make this project happen,” Gonzales said.

Kanellos is a Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Literature at the University of Houston and the founding publisher of The Americas Review. He also heads the publishing house Arte Público Press and is the director of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage of the United States, a national research program. His bibliography, “Hispanic Periodicals” in the United States, published in 2000, provided groundwork for the project.

Telles has produced and directed over 30 documentaries, including “The Fight in the Fields”, a feature documentary on the Farm Workers’ movement. His awards include three Emmy Awards and two PBS Programming Awards for News and Current Affairs.

With his son cameraman David Telles and associate producer Yvan Ituriaga, he is currently producing a documentary about the history of the Latino Press in the U.S. The story is told in interviews, but also features historic images and articles.

“[There are] five mini-segments showing what we’re going [through]…the activist papers of the 1960s and 70s,” he said.

The committee plans to go further with each theme in subsequent films, according to Gonzales.
A 15-minute trailer was shown at the Latino Film Festival in San Francisco, the Journalism Association of Community Colleges (JACC) SoCal conference in Los Angeles and at Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference at the University of Houston.

Telles noted how the film would mingle with the website which will be an interactive archive of the Latino press.

“We want the website to keep track of the Latino media as it grows,” Gonzales said.
Aiding in raising funds, Funabiki, a journalism professor at San Francisco State University, is the founding director of San Francisco State University’s Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism, which focuses on improving news media coverage of minority communities and issues.

Martinez also assists with the financial aspects of the projects and oversees programs the committee is planning. She is the executive director of Acción Latina and a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Funding has come from the Ford Foundation and private donors, but each member of the committee noted difficulty in funding the project.

“To me [funding] is the only obstacle, We have the expertise and dedication … we’re dedicated to getting this done,” Martinez said.

“At this stage, our biggest challenge is to get the money,” Gonzales said. “[In total] we need about $200,000 for the film, $50,000 for the book and $50,000 for the Web site.”

Despite these economic pitfalls, the committee members are going forward with the project, explaining the substantial influence of Latino press for Latino communities and the press overall.

Latino newspapers have provided their audiences with reinforcement of culture and identity, according to Gutiérrez.

“Historically, the newspapers were the central form of communication for a community,” Kanellos said.

Martínez discussed the concept of balancing American culture and what other cultures may be attached to being Latino and living in the U.S. “One thing these newspapers help to do is retain that duality, you don’t have to give up either thing,” she said.

“Your world isn’t all English or all Spanish,” Gutiérrez said.

The 2000 U.S. Census reported 45.7 percent of people living in San Francisco speak a language other than English at home. 36.8 percent of these people were born outside the U.S.

“California is far from being an English-only state,” Gonzales said. “The diverse population reflects that… there is a continued need for information in languages other than English.”

The committee also emphasized the significance of diversity in the press, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. “People in San Francisco need to know their journalism history,” Gutiérrez said.

***

After the presentation at the JACC SoCal conference, “[Latino students] swarmed the podium,” Gonzales said. “You could see the pride in their eyes, it made me feel really pleased. We’re doing it for them. That’s satisfaction. They’re just an extension of the pioneers we’re talking about.”

Martínez remarked on the presence and contributions of women in Latino press. “I learned that there were women involved early on, as publishers, editors, and writers… at least in the early 1900s there were some very powerful Latinas,” she said.

Martínez and Telles brought up Jovita Idar, a Mexican-American journalist and social activist who wrote articles criticizing the United States government for, what she believed, was unjust.
Idar criticized President Woodrow Wilson for deploying troops to the Mexican border during the Mexican Revolution. In response, Wilson sent Texas Rangers to shut down her paper. Upon their arrival Idar stood in the doorway, refusing to let them pass until they left.

“[It] showed how fierce she was, how strongly that family believed in the power of the press,” Telles continued.

Idar’s portrait is used on the logo for the “Voices for Justice” project.

For more information on Voices for Justice, visit their Web site: http://www.eltecolote.org/voices.

Photos by Alex Luthi
ONLINE EDITOR

By Lauren Tyler
Staff Writer

Driven by passion, not by fame and certainly not money, Lou Dematteis has spent nearly three decades documenting war-torn countries, using photographs to tell stories that would otherwise not be seen by the wider global community.

An internationally acclaimed photographer, Dematteis received an award from the World Press Photo in 1986 for his photo of Sandinista soldiers leading CIA agent Eugene Hasenfus into the Nicaraguan jungle, an image that would eventually allow him into the ranks of photographers working for the New York Times.

Since then, Dematteis has released three documentary photography books including his most recent “Crude Reflections,” co-written by Kayana Szymczak. Dematteis’ “Crude Reflections” documents the oil exploration and drilling of the Ecuadorian Amazon and includes stories told by indigenous people who say their lives have been effected by the oil industry’s efforts to extract oil from the region.

* * *

Born in Palo Alto, Calif. in 1948, Dematteis grew up in an Italian-American family in nearby Redwood City. He is fluent in Italian, which he learned at home while growing up. Dematteis first began taking photographs in grade school, using a point-and-shoot camera known as a Kodak Brownie. Later, he began to learn about the technical side of photography after his uncle gave him his camera. Most of the photos Dematteis took at that time were of his family and at school.

The former Reuters bureau chief and staff photographer had always had a genuine interest in global, social and political issues, moving to San Francisco to study political science at the University of San Francisco.

While in college, Dematteis concurrently took photography courses at the De Young Museum Art school. It was during his first of many trips to Italy that he decided photography was what he wanted to do.

“I was impressed by all the beautiful art and architecture. [It] flipped a switch inside,” said Dematteis.

Dematteis’ political and social knowledge worked alongside with his visual sense. “I found with photojournalism I could combine creative inspiration with wanting to affect the world,” he said.

Dematteis would make a number of trips to Italy to meet relatives, travel through the country and work on his photography. In 1977, Dematteis had his first exhibit in San Francisco with the work he had done abroad, sponsored by San Francisco’s Museo Italio Americano, marking the beginning of his photography career.

In 1978, Dematteis began working part time mainly for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and El Tecolote, a bilingual neighborhood newspaper in the Mission district of San Francisco, as well as taking on assignments for other publications.

In 1981, Dematteis accepted a full-time position with United Press International where he covered daily news and sports. Beginning of 1985, Dematteis went on his first of many trips to Central America to work for Reuters, after being offered an opportunity to back up a Reuters photographer working in Nicaragua. Working with Reuters, he would go on to become a salaried staff photographer for the international wire service.

While in Nicaragua, Dematteis covered the Contra wars, the conflict between Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government and the counter-revolutionary Contras.

“[I was] captured by the Contras, there were several situations where I could have easily been killed,” Dematteis said.

Dematteis said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from the immense amounts of violence and destruction he had seen while in Central America. “It took me a long time to relax,” he said.

While working on assignments for Reuters, Dematteis also began compiling information and photos for his book, “Nicaragua: A Decade of Revolution”, which was published in 1991.

Dematteis would leave his position at Reuters in 1990 in order to publish “Nicaragua”.
“In order to publish the book I had to quit Reuters. I took a point of view on the war,” Dematteis said. “I could understand [Reuters’] point of view because they could be charged with not being objective.” When on assignment, journalists attempt to forego their personal views on the assignment in an attempt to report the news objectively.

After Reuters, Dematteis focused on raising money to finance the publishing of “Nicaragua.” He said he had to do it on his own time, in addition to his regular assignments; in the end, he barely covered the costs.

“It was a financial hardship to do that book,” Dematteis said.

After the publication of “Nicaragua,” Dematteis returned to San Francisco, working again with Reuters as a contract photographer.

His next major project would focus on Vietnam, a country that had been cut off from most of the world since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. In “A portrait of Vietnam,” Dematteis wanted to document the reconciliation movement and show the world the human aspect of daily life in Vietnam as the country was becoming more accessible.

Dematteis focuses a great deal of attention on making connections and working with his sources in order to “develop an exchange” of contacts with the people that he meets.

Through his contacts, Dematteis was able to work with an acquaintance in the U.S. who was also working to normalize relations with Vietnam. After Dematteis’ “Nicaragua” was taken to Vietnam, Dematteis was invited into Vietnam by the Vietnamese Photography Association.
Since he was invited as a photographer and not a journalist, Dematteis was able to examine places and settings more thoroughly and with more freedom than a journalist would have. Although Dematteis could not converse as easily with the population in Vietnam as in Italy and Central America, he was still able to gather a cohesive story of people’s lives for his upcoming book.

“A Portrait of Viet Nam,” Dematteis’ second book, was started in 1992 and published in 1996. Dematteis said the book was distributed throughout the United States and Vietnam and was received very well. During the same year, President Clinton declared the normalization of relations with Vietnam.

After Vietnam, Dematteis returned to San Francisco and to Reuters. “I was working as a contract photographer, [and] the head of the photo bureau in San Francisco,” Dematteis said.

While he was based in San Francisco, Dematteis continued to travel throughout the world. In 2003, he was sent on assignment to Ecuador to follow-up on a legal battle between approximately 30,000 Ecuadorian Amazon residents and Texaco, now acquired by Chevron Corp. The Ecuadorians involved in the case alleged the waste from Texaco’s oil-drilling operations conducted from 1964 through 1990 is to blame for a range of health problems, cancers and birth defects afflicting inhabitants of the region.

Dematteis’s third book, “Crude Reflections” documents the stunning contrast between the pristine rain forest, the remnants of the region’s oil exploration and the effects of the exploration on the Ecuadorian Amazon, was printed in 2008.

Dematteis said people of the Ecuadorian Amazon want the toxic waste cleaned up so they can farm their lands for the cacao, corn and coffee, which used to grow abundant and healthy. In addition, he said they want the rivers to be clean again so they can bathe and drink without fear. Unfortunately though, “there are going to be some areas and aquifers that won’t be able to remediate,” said Dematteis.

Dematteis presented “Crude Reflections” to audiences twice at City College, and was exhibited in the Rayko Photo Center in downtown San Francisco from Nov. 7 to Dec. 6. Photojournalist Ed Kashi’s “Curse of the Black Gold,” a photo exhibit and book documenting the impact of oil exploration along the Niger Delta was shown along with Dematteis’ photographs.

The two photographers came together because as Kashi said, their work is “advocacy … these are issues that are pressing.”

Dematteis is promoting his book throughout the U.S. and continues to return to Ecuador to remind people there that “their efforts are not in vain.”

By Benjamin Taylor
Editor

Inside the Diego Rivera Theater, the stage is almost bare. There’s a wooden step ladder, some coiled rope, and several old props laying displaced on dusty wooden planks. The theater is empty too, save for three occupied seats, and two figures up on stage working among the bare bones of a living room set: a couch, a coffee table and a window frame looking out on empty seats.

Lee Meriwether’s voice echoes through the theater as she recites her lines, occasionally calling out to director Susan Jackson for cues. She gazes out wistfully through the window frame into the shadow, which in one week’s time will be the opening night audience for City College’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“It’s really an amazing piece of literature,” said Meriwether, during a break. “It’s about Eugene O’Neill’s family, and he’s so brutally honest about it. Of course, he wrote it when they were all gone. But for him to face those ghosts was really rather amazing at that time.”

It was 2007 when Meriwether and Jackson discovered their mutual admiration for the playwright Eugene O’Neill.

“Lee and I were talking and I told her that I was on the Eugene O’Neill board. She said ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to do ‘A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ and I said ‘so have I!’”

Director Susan Jackson first met Meriwether in 1985, when they both starred in a City College production of “The Artful Lodgers,” a play written by Meriwether’s husband Marshal Borden, who also acted in the play.

“We’ve been in contact since then,” Jackson said. “To direct her is just a dream come true. I certainly enjoyed acting with her on stage, but directing her has just been wonderful.”

As one of City College’s most distinguished alumni, Meriwether took theater classes here in 1955. She was chosen to represent the school that year in the Miss San Francisco beauty pageant, which she won. That year she was also crowned Miss California, and then Miss America. She has starred in television series spanning from “Barnaby Jones” to “All My Children,” appeared in dozens of movies including the original “Batman” starring Adam West and she has remained a dedicated stage actress. Meriwether is back where her career began, performing a play that will benefit the Kennedy Student Scholarship. At 73 years old, she shows no signs of slowing down, nor has she forgotten her City College roots.

Over the years, Meriwether has returned to City College several times to star in productions including “Our Town” and “Happy End,” with the proceeds always going to charitable causes. She always welcomes the opportunity to give back to her school, and to bring attention to college theater, which she says is still alive and well, “and thank heaven for it.”

In this production, Meriwether plays the role of Mary Tyrone, a morphine addicted wife and mother of the dysfunctional Tyrone family.

“It’s one of the great roles in theatrical history really, and there aren’t that many roles out there for women of age,” Meriwether said. “It’s challenging, the magnitude of it. We catch her later on in life, when she’s recovered from a morphine addiction, and all of a sudden it starts over again.”

She speaks with a slow, wise tone that comes with a lifetime’s experience while choosing her words carefully and making sure to convey the deepest meaning with the simplest terms. When on stage, her movements are graceful, and even from the back row her appearance is immediately striking.

Meriwether said from the time she was in the fourth grade, all she ever wanted to do was act.

“It’s unusual that I got to fulfill that dream,” said Meriwether, who first performed on the stage when she was in grammar school, singing “Have Yourself a Merry Christmas,” in a school production of “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

After attending George Washington High School, where she acted in several plays, Meriwether enrolled in City College to study theater arts and English. She was living on Portola Drive at the time with her parents and primarily chose the school because it was conveniently located.

“The theater, when I went here, was very small. It was in the main building down in the basement,” Meriwether said. “It used to be the old ROTC shooting range, so it was very long and narrow.”

She looks up with a soft smile and a far away look as she thinks back.

“We were performing this play, and our backs were right up against the wall, but we needed to have some space behind us. How we had the gumption back then to do this I don’t know,” she said with a laugh. “But I remember one day that I noticed something sparkling shiny, like metal in the wall behind us.”

When the wall behind them was demolished, they found that a gap between two buildings had been filled with thick steel train tracks to prevent bullets from going through into the classroom next door. “The shining metal that I had seen was a bullet,” said Meriwether. “There were hundreds of flattened bullets stuck into the metal.”

One year of City College was all Meriwether took. That year she was chosen to represent the school in the Miss San Francisco pageant.

“I had such a good time, because we didn’t have this theater, we had our little rifle range, and to make that work, to put on plays that worked in that space was fun,” Meriwether said of her year at City College. “And we did it and they worked out pretty darned good. We had a lot of fun.”

“Then it was Miss California, and then Miss America. From there I went right in to television in New York with the today show.”

Meriwether was The Today Show’s first ever female editor, and according to her biography the position enabled her to use her scholarships from the pageants to study dance, singing and acting with some of the top coaches in New York. As a result, she soon landed her first television role on “The Philco Television Playhouse,” with Mary Astor. From there she went on to star in her first motion picture, “The 4-D Man,” with Robert Lansing, and made her first professional stage appearance in “Hateful of Rain.” However, Meriwether is probably most well-known for her portrayal of “Betty” in the CBS series, “Barnaby Jones,” a role she played for eight years and earned her nominations for the Golden Globe and the Emmy awards.

Though it was brief, Lee looks back on her time at City College fondly, reminiscing of when she acted in productions such as “Kind Lady,” which she counts among her favorite roles.
“It was a role where I played a demented woman and she was just off her rocker. I had about six lines, and they were all ‘Yes Henry, yes Henry, yes Henry,’ that’s all she said. She was a swindler’s gal, but she was demented, so he just used her. It was a wild play.”

Today, Meriwether is based in Los Angeles and flies out to New York periodically for appearances on “All my Children.” She recently co-starred with Ed Harris, playing his drunken, cigarette-smoking mother in a new movie called “Touching Home,” which has yet to be released and last year played the part of a secretary in the movie “The Ultimate Gift,” with James Garner.

According to Susan Jackson, Meriwether returns to City College about every eight or nine years.

“I’m hoping to encourage some other alumni to come back and appear here,” Meriwether said. “Ted Lange and I wanted to do ‘Love Letters,’ and we may well do it within the next two years. I talked to him a while ago and he said ‘Oh yeah, lets do it!’”

Jackson says that she is happy to give students the opportunity to work with someone of Lee’s caliber and experience, and also a chance to showcase O’Neill’s work.

“Lee has come to my classes and talked at my classes. She’s a part of the college community, truly,” Jackson said.

Meriwether says that she is having a great time working on the play.

“I’m loving it,” Meriwether said. “It’s been quite a moving experience.”

Photostory by Christina R. Hernandez
Editor

The Dia de los Muertos festival in Fruitvale ran down Oakland’s International Boulevard, stretching from Fruitvale Avenue to 39th Avenue on Oct. 26, 2008. The main attractions were the altars, a Dia de los Muertos staple, created by professional artists and members of the public who were moved to honor life and death.

Dia de los Muertos, Spanish for “Day of the Dead,” is a Mexican tradition of honoring the dead, dating back to pre-Columbian times. It is currently celebrated in Mexico on Nov. 1-2, coinciding with the Catholic holidays of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. Altars include traditional decorations, such as hand-made skulls and skeletons, adorned with elaborate designs, yellow marigolds, sugar skulls, and pan dulce, though personal artifacts and photos are also used.

Three stages, located at Fruitvale Avenue, Fruitvale Village, and at 35th Avenue along International Boulevard featured a variety of Latino bands and dancers. It was unclear exactly where the official festival ended, as crowds stretched to the 4000 block of International Boulevard, reaching a fourth stage just past 40th Avenue.

Around 1 p.m., crowds congested the boulevard, especially around the stages. Intersections that would have normally taken seconds to cross on foot instead took several minutes, as people tried to navigate themselves though the festival or get a better view of the performers. Bands, including including Toni Quintero y Su Poder Michoacano and Mystique and others of different genres such as Latin rock, salsa, Duranguense and Norteño performed during the festival.

Aztec and Mexican folk dancers in full regalia entertained the visitors with different styles of dancing, and a troupe of “muertos” played tag games with children in the crowded street. Many vendors sold Dia de los Muertos decorations. The predominant element of the decorations is the skeleton, often specifically the skull, or calavera.

By Al Lin
Contributing Photographer

City College’s dance classes convened in the Wellness Center on Oct. 18 to host a night celebrating a new era of dance at the Wellness Center. Students and residents alike paired up to salsa with latin dance band Mazacote on the new North Plaza, while others took an introductory lesson on the Feldenkrais method taught by Jean Elvin.

As the sun set and the autumn moon rose, the dancers moved inside to the various studios of the Wellness Center, waltzing to Seal’s hit “Kiss by a Rose” and learning West Coast swing from instructor Steve Rockwell.

When the clock struck eight, the guests lined up to head into the Wellness Center’s theatre for a mélange of performances by the dance department. Kathe Burick and her intermediate tap class opened the show tapping to Chip Webb’s “Spinning the Webb” jazz piece. Other notable highlights included a Mongolian dance performance and a performance by the City College Cheerleading Squad.

For more information on upcoming dances, check the City College athletics Web site at www.ccsframs.com. The dance department will be holding a Halloween Ball on Saturday the 25th.

City College journalism students won 24 awards in various categories at the Journalism Association of Community Colleges’ NorCal conference Oct. 11, held at San Jose State University.

In addition to competitions, the conference also offered several sessions of workshops relating to the journalism industry, ranging from media law, photojournalism and sports photography, newspaper design and securing internships at publications.

City College was joined by 22 other Northern California community colleges at the annual conference. The state convention for JACC will be held in Sacramento, Calif. on March 26 to 28, 2009, with over 50 community colleges expected to attend.






Below is a list of awards won by City College students at JACC NorCal 2008:

Tabloid General Excellence - The Guardsman
Online General Excellence - The Guardsman
Editor-in-Chief Achievement Award - Alex Luthi, The Guardsman
Editor-in-Chief Achievement Award - Melissa Bosworth, etc. Magazine

Mail-In:

First Place, Feature Photo - Alex Luthi
First Place, Profile Feature Story - Ben Taylor
First Place, Student Designed Advertisment - Jessica Luthi
Second Place, Column Writing - Dominik Mosur
Second Place, Profile Feature Story - Paul Wertheim
Third Place, News Photo - Alex Luthi
Fourth Place, Sports Game Story - Bryan Grace and Paul Wertheim
Honorable Mention, Editorial Cartoon - Michale Morgan
Honorable Mention, Line Illustration - Michael Morgan
Honorable Mention, Photo Story / Essay - Alex Luthi
Honorable Mention, Sports Game Story - Paul Wertheim
Honorable Mention, Tabloid Front Page Layout - Alex Mullaney
Honorable Mention, Tabloid Inside Page Layout - Jessica Luthi

On-The-Spot:

Second Place, News Photo - Christina Hernandez
Second Place, Tabloid News Judgement / Layout - Jessica Luthi
Third Place, Editorial Cartoon - Jessica Luthi
Fourth Place, Tabloid News Judgement / Layout - Arcel Cunanan
Honorable Mention, Copy Editing - Aaron Light

Bring-In:

First Place, Bring-In Ad - Jessica Luthi
Second Place, Bring-In Photo - Christina Hernandez
Fourth Place, Bring-In Infographic - Jessica Luthi

Results for mail-in and on-the-spot / bring-in contests for all colleges: jacconline.org

By Alex Luthi
Editor

The San Francisco LoveFest took over the city’s financial district on Oct. 4, with an estimated 70,000 festival goers in attendance, according to LoveFest officials.

With its beginnings as Loveparade San Francisco, LoveFest has become San Francisco’s yearly electronic music parade that travels down Market Street each fall, beginning at 2nd and Market Streets and ends at the Civic Center Plaza, where the parade route ends and each float takes up a position around the plaza late into the evening.

This year 28 floats surrounded the Civic Center Plaza, both featuring local and international talent. Fans anticipating big names like Benny Benassi, Lee Burridge, Dave Dresden and Armin van Buuren had to wait for Saturday evening’s sold-out afterparty, with tickets going for $80 at the door.