Anaϊs lived in a glass house overlooking Silver Lake that she referred to as her 'house of mirrors.' She shared the house with her long-time companion Rupert Pole who had the house built for her by his half-brother Eric Lloyd Wright, the grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was secluded from the street by a long drive leading down to it, and as Nin wrote, "the entire house was one large studio, no separate small partitions. It had the sense of space of Japanese houses; it had the vista of Japanese screen, all sky, mountains, lake, as if one lived out of doors. Yet the roof, held by its heavy beams, gave a feeling of protection while the big windows which separated the roof from the studio framed the flight of birds, the sailing of clouds."

Henry resided downstairs in the two-story home he bought in the sixties to house his former wife Lepska (they had divorced in the early fifties) and their two children, Tony and Val, and himself. By the time I met Henry, Lepska, the third of his five wives, was gone, Val and Tony grown up, and he had just divorced his fifth wife, a Japanese singer he had met at a piano bar a few years earlier. Periodically Tony stayed in the house as did an assortment of itinerant people who came for a while and then moved on.

Henry was a tough old bird, rather like a turkey with his croaky voice, heavily veined, creped hands, parchment-thin skin, wattled throat and indomitable, naked head. As his body failed him, the eyes, the ears, the bowels, the bladder, the bones, he shrugged his shoulders and with head held high said, "We must accept what comes, don't you know?"

The strategy and tactics used by the Los Angeles Police Department in clearing the Occupy LA encampment have been widely praised: There have been salutes to the new, community-friendly, "constitutional" LAPD.

We were there throughout the night of the eviction. We were inside City Hall Park prior to the action. We left the park only to seek out Chief Perez at the police plaza across the street, in the hope of gaining access in order to stand witness to the arrests we knew would take place. That access had been denied by Chief Beck in our meeting with him on Monday.

In the immediate advent of the police action, Chief Perez said that we could enter the park "once the area was under control." We were held on the plaza during the actual operation, and were later escorted into the park where we clarified to protesters that they could still leave if they did not intend to be arrested, and to stand as witness to the arrests. We had played a similar role in the Bank of America action on November 17--blessing arrestees and calming them--to great effect.

Unlike in Oakland and New York recently, there were no officers swinging batons and wielding pepper spray. There were not the kind of storm-trooper tactics associated with what Connie Rice calls "your grandfather's LAPD." From the police plaza, we did, however, observe overwhelming use of terrifying force (portrayed in the LA Times on Thursday, November 1 as a work of military prowess) against what was, by then, a very small number of peaceful Occupiers still inside the perimeter. And we heard from trustworthy friends inside the park that while batons were not swung, they were certainly wielded hands-apart against unresisting people.

We wonder, after weeks of commendable restraint, why the spectacular shock and awe? Why the white hazmat suits? Why the hundreds (1400 by Beck's admission) of riot-suited officers, the hundreds of police vehicles, the many police helicopters hovering loudly overhead?

If the mayor does respect and appreciate the Occupiers, as he assured us he does during that meeting with religious leaders and Chief Beck on Monday, why the military-style eviction and disrespectful trashing of private property in the park the City Council had resolved could be the movement's home? Why the exorbitant $5000 bail for civil disobedience?

The Mayor and the Chief want to have it both ways: They want to be heroes--leaders of the only city in the nation to clear their park gently, in collaboration with the Occupy movement; but they want to make it clear that they are still forceful, still in control, still all-powerful. They are not sissies.

From what we observed, the action early Wednesday morning was far from respectful: it was physically and psychologically violent. We thank God the Occupiers were well trained from the outset in non-violent response. Had there not been that training, nor their firm resolution by consensus to that principle, the story would have been tragically different.

Since the eviction, we have watched as crews of city workers sanitize what had been an emblem of noble human aspiration and righteous indignation against what we deem true crimes: bank fraud and corporate sleaze. It's crucial that we not let the City and the media under its sway sanitize the story of how and why that emblem was taken down.

Stacie Chaiken
Rabbi Jonathan Klein
Reverend Peter Laarman
Shakeel Syed
Members, Occupy Los Angeles Interfaith Sanctuary

Young people today can go from home to college, back home, and to their first apartment. However, my friend Roshawn had nowhere to lay her head.

I met her six years ago when she wandered in to L.A. Youth, our teen journalism training program. She wanted to set her own story down.

The story she told broke our hearts. Her heroin-addicted mother wound up with her children on Skid Row. Four people squeezed into a single room occupancy hotel - no kitchen and a bathroom down the hall with the luxury of sharing it with any kind of transient. They endured for four years.

She made the long trip from Skid Row to Reseda High School, until the fall 2003 bus strike. She was out of school for six weeks and fell so far behind with her schoolwork that she was forced to drop out.

No one called from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

No one provided assistance from L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services.

No one investigated from any agency.

For a short time an older sister's couch in Inglewood provided respite from the drug dealers, violence and madness of Skid Row. Roshawn completed classes to qualify for the GED and she began taking classes at Los Angeles Trade Tech College to pursue a career in early childhood development.

But, this was not to be. The crowding and myriad responsibilities of the house ultimately sent her back to Skid Row, where she's permitted to sleep in a shelter for the next 30 days.

Will any downtown developer offer her shelter now?

With no permanent address how will she secure employment?

I haven't seen Roshawn for a few years. She had a baby in March 2007. Her daughter lived with a foster family for a time. How many more generations of her family will endure these hardships?

High-rises, lofts and businesses are within proximity to Skid Row. The people who live and work in these places step over and around the hundreds of homeless people sleeping in doorways and under plastic tarps. The neighborhood park is off-limits for children as dozens of mentally ill and homeless adults sleep on benches and clutch their belongings stored in shopping carts. Children and teens have few safe places to gather outside of their hotel rooms.

Shelters, over-crowded rooms and Skid Rows are crises that don't tally in our minds because we've heard them so often. But, my friend Roshawn is a living, breathing, striving victim of these disasters."

Silence at the dinner table. No one stayed for dessert.

Donna Myrow is founder and publisher of L.A. Youth, the non-profit newspaper.

I was there to lead a twice-weekly journalism program and train students to publish El Original, a bi-lingual community newspaper. With ten years of publishing a citywide teen-written newspaper behind me, this promised to be an excellent opportunity to share my expertise with students living on the margins of mainstream L.A. By the time I arrived, the surrounding neighborhood had become 80 percent Latino, mostly immigrants from El Salvador. They had fled their war-torn country for new beginnings in the City of Angels, only to find low-paying jobs, over-crowded housing and warring gangs terrorizing the streets.

Gunshots were common. The first time I heard a shot from across the street, I dropped to my knees, ducked under a desk and screamed. The students laughed. When I yelled that someone should run to the office and ask a clerk to call the police, they looked at me as if I were from another planet.

"The police won't come unless someone is dead," said Herbert.

"But that shot was right outside," I replied. "Someone could be hurt." They ignored me.

"Do you want to buy a gun?" one of the other boys asked me. "I can get you an Uzi for fifty dollars but if you have twenty dollars I can get something smaller."

I told him I hated guns.

Jefferson was an opportunity to work with teens that were absolutely cut off from mainstream life in Los Angeles. The odds against their success were overwhelming. Academic skills were so low that most were functioning below grade school level. Even their Spanish was strictly conversational; few could construct a sentence in their native language.

Enrique, talented at art, produced terrific illustrations if I hounded him. But more often, he sat staring out the window, disengaged from the rest of us.

Herbert was a mediocre student but responded with enthusiasm when I loaned him a camera to shoot pictures in his neighborhood. He and his mother had spent six months on foot making their way from El Salvador to Los Angeles. They invited me to dinner one night, served on a wobbly card table in their tiny one-room apartment. She wanted to thank me for taking an interest in her son.

Frank Young, the only black in the class, filled notebooks with rambling tales of his family's journey from West Texas, selling books door-to-door, hitting the road again when the rent money ran out. His dream was to write a book about his family history, but it took two years to make a single article of his ready for publication in El Original.

The Jefferson program was the most stress-filled and frustrating attempt at outreach that I ever experienced. I had to keep in mind that I was there to teach journalism, not to solve social problems. They live here, I leave at the end of the day, I reminded myself. At the end of each session, I also said a silent prayer: "Please let me find all four tires on my car. Steal the radio or junk in the back seat, but let me leave here."

Three years into the project, just as we were making progress and I felt comfortable in the neighborhood, El Original was cancelled. Funding came from a state agency trying to tackle drug and alcohol problems. Typical bureaucracy, just as something clicks, kill the program and start something new. The teen-written articles carried a strong message about the multitude of liquor stores in the community, billboards close to schools promoting smoking and drug epidemic destroying families.

Flash forward to 2011 as California cuts and dumps community programs again.
In Los Angeles County, there are more than 250,000 young men of color between the ages of 12 and 19, and they are in crisis. They do worse in school and drop out at higher rates than any other group. They attend college at much lower rates than other groups, and they have much higher unemployment and incarceration rates. They are much more likely to be victims (and perpetrators) of violent crimes than people in other groups.

There are many causes for the crisis. Changes in the American (and world) economy have made it much harder for young, poorly-educated men to get a toehold in the economy. Discrimination is still a fact of life. There are far too few positive role models for these young men--especially among their peers, which is the group that is most credible to them. There is tremendous pressure to live up to negative stereotypes--from pop culture, peers, and some community norms. A high percentage lack fathers as role models.

Frank, Herbert and Enrique are now adults. At our last meeting Herbert said he had a job with the airlines; he needed to care for his ailing mother. Frank left school without a diploma wandering the country in search of lost relatives. Every once in a while I get a postcard from him, letting me know that he is still working on his family's history. Enrique -- who knows if he's alive. I've lost track of them. They gave me a glimpse into the lives of impoverished young men of color and left the program feeling as if someone cared about them, their thoughts and ideas. More importantly, knowing that the state funded the program, gave them the feeling that they were a valued member of our society.

Today's generation needs the same opportunity. California, no longer the golden state, will fill the streets, jails and unemployment lines with men without a memory of success. I've learned how structural racism and social inequity works, learning not only from experts but also young people at the frontlines of failing schools and communities. El Original made its early mark with social/emotional learning that highlighted the importance of being sensitive to what others feel and want. The students and I built bridges of trust and understanding.

Donna Myrow conceived and opened L.A. Youth, the newspaper by and about teens, and in 2003 launched the Foster Youth Writing and Education Project.

In 1962 Ben Margolis saved my father from imminent deportation. It's an odd, but maybe not that unusual story. It's about the long arm of the FBI and the institutional memory of La Migra. Dad was sixty-eight in 1962 and had a long, tiresome history with the INS. He first came to the U.S. on the English ship, the Patricia, from Częstochowa, Poland in 1913. The city was a favorite of Pope John Paul II, who visited it both before and after he was elected. The pope who was born in 1920 and my father, born in 1894, never crossed paths.

Dad was first arrested in 1928 in Los Angeles by the police department's Red Squad for some protest he had joined at the time. A romantic traveler, he held many jobs and like many others became infatuated with the Communist Party after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. He also joined the Worker's Communist Party the year he was arrested.

Long before I was born, he had been kicked out of the party for lack of discipline, but he always dreamed that some day our country would become a land of plenty for all. Not much of a theoretician--he had only completed the third grade in Poland--he was a devoted and loyal resident of this country. Even before his first arrest, he applied for citizenship but was turned down. He would apply six more times but was never able to get his foot in the door. A voracious reader, he taught himself English and had read the Constitution, as well as many books about American history.

In a time when it was possible for hundreds of thousands to immigrate legally, he received a green card, which was his only means of identification. He never learned to drive. He reported to the local INS office once a year for thirty-five years, was up for deportation during that entire time, and whenever he left the city he was living in, he was required to notify the agents. His last deportation hearing was in 1953 and by 1962 his file apparently was dormant.

July 27, 1962, early in the day; I think it was ten o'clock. I and my two small children, two and three-years-old, were home alone. My husband, Jerry, was out of town on business. The doorbell rang, something that just didn't happen very often during the day. I looked out the window of our house on Kingsbury [Street] in the San Fernando Valley. And there, across the street, a green non-descript Ford was parked. And I knew, I just knew that it was the FBI. They had certainly followed me often enough when I was a teenager.

I opened the door like a fool, and invited the two men in. I was a bit impressed that they had come to visit me. I was bored, home with two children, and I had recently attended a meeting of the local chapter for the California Democratic Council. I didn't connect the visit with the meeting until several weeks later. It was like something out of an old FBI movie.

One agent was young and the other was much older. They wore business suits. "Anna," the older man asked me, setting a tone of casual friendliness, "do you still believe in the ideas you had when you were a member of the Labor Youth League?" I was no longer a student of Marxism, and loathed the Soviet Union, so I said, "No, not at all."

The younger agent took up the next question. "Do you think anyone you knew then joined the Communist Party?" I thought for a few moments and said, "Yeah, some might have joined."

"Well, what are their names?" Now I was annoyed. "I don't know if they joined the party," I said, "and I can't tell you their names because they might not have. I'd be ruining their lives."

The older agent then asked, "Would you be willing to join an organization and report back to us on what people were saying?" Still treating the whole episode rather lightly, I answered, "Oh, you mean like Elizabeth Bentley?" Bentley was perhaps the most notorious stool-pigeon of the time that screenwriter Dalton Trumbo aptly described as "The Time of the Toad." She had been a spy for the Communist Party and sometime after WWII she switched sides and became a famous namer of names, more than 150, most of whom she shared with the House Un-American Activities Committee that had held hearings on the East and West Coast for several years. She was also paid by the FBI for her work.

The agents were delighted. "Yes, that's it." I was still astonished by their interest in me. "No, I can't do that," I said, now thoroughly on my guard. The young agent then said, "It'll go easier on your father if you cooperate." I got really frightened and told them to leave. They did.

A few days later my father called. He had received a letter from the INS ordering him to leave the country within ten days or he would be deported. He told me that Poland had already said they didn't want him back, not that he wanted to go there. He was prepared to go to Mexico, he told me. Dad was in his late sixties, had an irregular career as a part-time waiter, and no education beyond the third grade. He didn't speak Spanish and had never left the U.S. since his days with the Merchant Marine before his 1928 arrest.

That's when Ben Margolis stepped in. Margolis represented many Hollywood figures during the infamous period of the Red Scare, but he was less known for his pro-bono work for the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, especially the Los Angeles Committee. Dad had long been active with the committee, volunteering for a variety of activities. Attorney Margolis asked for a hearing for my father, He appealed the deportation order, citing my father's age and long residence in this country; the deportation order was lifted, and my father's file was finally closed.

My father was just one of several immigrants that Mr. Margolis saved from deportation to countries in Eastern Europe and Greece where dictatorships reigned; where many of these potential deportees undoubtedly would have been killed. Dad had appeared at six hearings between 1928 and 1952 where the government tried to have him deported. For those thirty-four years, he reported, once a year, to the Immigration Office wherever he lived; and if he left the city, he had to report that as well.

Many people know about the Hollywood Blacklist; very few know that thousands of ordinary people in 1940s and 1950s lost their jobs because of the blacklisting initiated often by the FBI itself. My father was lucky. So was I. The FBI frequently followed me in the 1950s, attempted to get me fired from at least one job before I got married, and, in 1997 when I finally got a copy of my file, I learned that they had continued to follow me well into the 1960s even though they reported I was no longer considered an active risk. Fortunately, I was born in this country, so I didn't need to hire Ben Margolis, but if I had, he would have taken the case in a heartbeat. I'm sure of that. It's just too bad that today's deportees can't count on someone like Ben Margolis.

Anna Sklar is the author of "Brown Acres: An Intimate History of the Los Angeles Sewers" (Angel City Press) and the former public affairs director for the city Department of Public Works.

In 1992, at the start of the L.A. riots, he was threatened by a gunman outside the Times building. George didn't budge, telling the man: "I'm a reporter...I don't know what you're going to do but I'm going to do my job." As George wrote later: "He didn't shoot. He just picked up a rock, flung it at the Times and ran away."

George's tough demeanor made it all the more surprising in 2007 when he openly broke into tears while being inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He was grateful and deeply moved by the honor. He always called himself "just a kid from East L.A."

These images leaped to mind Sunday when I learned the sad news: George Ramos had died at age 63 at his condo in Morro Bay. I learned through a friend that George had been having increasing trouble in the last months managing his diabetes.

George had planned to come to L.A. next Sunday and we were going to get together. The last time we talked, I asked him for his cell number. "I don't have one and I don't want one," he replied. "You must be the only one in California," I said. No, he laughed. "There are three of us."

Senor Ramos, as I often called him, came to the Times in 1979 after having worked for Copley newspapers in Los Angeles and for the San Diego Union. Times editors learned that was a valuable street reporter and that he could quickly produce a story. He was rewarded by being sent to Riverside as bureau chief of the one-man bureau. Colleagues in what passed as ethnic "humor" in those days gave him a can of spray paint and a clipboard as a going-away present. But before long, he was back as an assistant city editor in the Orange County Edition.

Our bonding experience occurred in 1983 when we were the co-editors of the series "Latinos in Southern California." The series went on to win the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, but while we were at work on it, we put tremendous pressure on ourselves to succeed. There were 18 Mexican American reporters, editors and photographers at the Times and we were unhappy with the diet of news the Times was dishing out about Latinos. So we came up with our own story ideas, and Deputy Managing Editor Noel Greenwood gave the green light for the series.

George wrote a first-person story about growing up in East L.A. He described life in his working-class neighborhood as American as in Kansas. When I edited that piece, I told him that I wanted "more Grandma" - that she was a real character and that readers would relate to her story. George hesitated a minute and then jumped on a computer and gave us "more Grandma."

In one passage, George wrote, "I've never understood how a person with such limited English ability can give a running commentary in Spanish of 'Days of Our Lives.' But she does."

George later would tell that story to students to emphasize the human side of journalism story-telling - to write not only from the head but also from the heart.

Soon after the not-guilty verdicts were announced in the beating of Rodney King, angry demonstrators gathered at the LAPD headquarters downtown and ran down First Street, where they broke large windows at the Times. George was sent to check it out. That is when the gunman approached and George stared him down.

George told that anecdote in a first-person piece he wrote about the Los Angeles riots that had started on that same night. Expressing his disappointment about the rioting, he wrote: "Los Angeles, you broke my heart. And I'm not sure I'll love you again."

The truth is that George quickly regained his love for L.A. but he could also be one of its severest critics.

He was promoted to being a once-weekly columnist in the Metro section. He did some excellent work, finding little-known characters and sharing insights about his native city. However, he rarely got the coaching and guidance from editors that would have consistently made his work sparkle. Later, he returned to the reporting ranks.

After work, George taught reporting at USC evening classes. He was tough there too, but it would be more accurate to call it "tough love," better to prepare aspiring journos for the rigors of the reporting life. He took a year off to teach journalism as a professional in residence at the University of Arizona, where he was a big hit. And when the director's job opened up at this alma mater, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he jumped for it. It was no surprise that he was chosen for the position.

George loved his work with students, knowing that he influenced not only their careers but also their lives. But he had no stomach for academic politics and running a department during a time of declining campus budgets. After several years, he was back to teaching and mentoring students, not only at Cal Poly but also each summer at the Student Campus program of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Over the years, George helped boost the journalism careers of many hundreds of students. One of them, Lauren M. Rabaino, wrote in her blog: "But the most important thing to know is that though he put on a tough face, he really and truly cared about his students. He wanted us to succeed and he supported what he did."

George twice served as president of California Chicano News Media Association, now known as CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California. And he was a loyal contributor to its scholarship fund for aspiring Latino journalists. More attention had to be focused, he often said, to reporting from growing Latino communities.

George did not talk a lot to me about his Vietnam experience, but he did remark at times that he was still dealing with "demons from Vietnam." He regularly took part in ceremonies on the Eastside when Veterans Day and Memorial Day came around.

Tucson photojournalist Fred Araiza traveled to Vietnam with George several years ago. On their return, Fred arranged for an L.A. gathering at an American Legion hall; he called it "Welcome Home, George." Because the welcome for Vietnam vets had not always been warm during the contentious Vietnam period, this event served to honor George's service in the war. My friend George, the fearless reporter, the speak-truth-to-power guy, was very touched by the gesture. Beneath that big mustache of his, that big smile was a big heart.

Sotomayor, a former Times editor, is an adjunct faculty member at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He previously wrote about Ruben Salazar for LA Observed

While I won't try to predict the outcome of the mayoral race in 2013, as the field of candidates is just beginning to gel, there was one statement that Fox made that I felt needed to be clarified.

In his column he wrote: "A number of analysts looking at the coming mayor's race feel the environment is similar to the time Republican attorney and businessman Richard Riordan captured the mayor's office in 1993. The opportunity may be there for a business executive to take control of the city government once again."

This section is where I find the most disagreement — and by the way who are these analysts?

The atmosphere that existed in Los Angeles in 1993 is a far cry from the current city we all now live in.

One only need look at the crime rates as reported by the California Dept of Justice. You can see that since 1993, homicides, rape and robbery are all at record lows.

There is also another major element missing from the 1993 mayoral playbook - a recent race riot. The city of Los Angeles was a different place after the Rodney King verdict, and is a completely changed place today. Heck, one only need to be in West Hollywood this past weekend to see people of every race, creed and sexual orientation celebrating each other's diversity in one of the largest PRIDE parades in the United States. (To be fair this was in the city of West Hollywood, however one can easily surmise many of the participants were local Angelinos.)

Next, the 1993 mayor's race was only eight little years from the frightening gas explosion in March of 1985 where a local Ross Store was destroyed because of methane gas underneath it - this little event served as an end to all mass-rail transportation along LA's busiest corridor.

Fast forward to today. We now have a major local stimulus working its way down the pipe in the form of Measure R. ($40 billion invested in Los Angeles) This will have the added effect of connecting many more communities with each other in a more socially dynamic way via subway, thus helping us celebrate our diversity, not deny it.

Lastly, California was still in a deep recession in 1993. Today, it appears by all economic standards we have seen the last of the Bush near-Depression that he inflicted on this nation. Come 2013 we should be on a more solid economic footing - one only need look at the $6 billion boon in taxes that arrived in Sacramento recently to know Los Angeles is about a year away from seeing its mini-boon too.

And who will be handing the next mayor of Los Angeles record low crime, new investments in an unprecedented transportation network connecting language, culture and people, while handing off a city trending in the black on the economic scales?

Just your friendly Latino-Labor-Democratic Mayor named - Antonio Villaraigosa.

No Joel - 2013 is nothing like 1993, and to that I say "Thank God."

Michael Trujillo, a longtime Villaraigosa political operative, is a political consultant who grew up in the Valley and who now lives Downtown. He says he's unaffiliated in the 2013 race for mayor.

Early in 2000, a book of mine was published with the snappy title, See How She Runs: Marion Jones and the Making of a Champion. I am thinking of publishing a new edition under the title, Never Mind, but that's another story.

Anyway, as the Olympics began that summer, I set to work on an updated paperback version that would cover Jones' performance in the Olympics. Since I couldn't afford the time or expense of a trip to Sydney, I did what anybody living in Chicago who wanted to see the Games as they were taking place would do. I drove to Detroit, rented a hotel room, and watched the Canadian broadcast.

Boy, were they having fun. Reading the Australian papers in the morning, zipping out to Bondi Beach to check in on the beach volleyball scene, buttonholing fans from all over the world on the streets of Sydney, taking you out to the track for the heats of the 100-meter dash in which Maurice Greene and Jones would establish their dominance for the days ahead. With all this and more, the Canadian broadcasters really captured the spirit of the Olympics, a spirit Americans haven't seen in a generation.

There was also a moment that made you want to cry. While NBC had a reporter in a dark Olympic stadium talking about the excitement Australia was feeling as the time grew near when the country's great sports hero, Cathy Freeman, would light the torch at the Opening Ceremonies, the Canadian broadcast was showing that very moment taking place. Americans wouldn't see it, and would see only a severely edited version of it at that, for nearly an entire day.

A few months later, Bob Costas came through town to promote a book and we went to lunch. How did it feel, I asked him, to go on the air in the dead of the Australian night so he could be the only image NBC saw fit to transmit live from Sydney for 17 days? What did he think of being reduced to a ringmaster of a circus long after the elephants left the building?

Always the loyal soldier, Costas hemmed and hawed a bit, then said it wasn't timidity that kept him from criticizing his network's effort, but respect for his colleagues. And then, by indirection, he said what needed to be said about the Ebersol approach.

"I'm not angry," Costas said. "I'm disappointed. I was the host of the Olympics, not the producer of the Olympics, and if I had my way, there are some things that would have been done differently."

The irony of this state of affairs is almost excruciatingly diabolical. Without American television money, the Olympics as we know them today would cease to exist. U.S. networks, and U.S. advertisers, pay a huge portion of the international Olympic movement's budget. And to recoup its investment, NBC says it must do everything it can to draw a prime-time audience, which means show nothing until prime time. The network spends so much money to televise the Olympics, in other words, that it doesn't dare to televise the Olympics. Not as they are taking place.

Nor does the network choose to show much of them in prime time, preferring to concentrate instead on its trademark "storytelling." "The results of the Olympics are not what truly matter to the vast majority of the audience," Ebersol once said. "They're interested in the story." Which is to say the athletes' battles against cancer, blindness and the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Ebersol said surveys show audiences aren't as great during the day as during prime time, and he is surely right about that. But what is the harm, we may ask, in showing the events live for those who do want to see them, then replaying them for a wider audience later on? The harm, if I follow Ebersol's reasoning, is all those people who supposedly aren't watching won't tune in during prime time and the ratings will suffer. Not to mention, of course, the fact that once the tape has been shown, other networks are free to air it.

Here is the paradox. We live in a time when instant communication is possible throughout the world. Yet the network whose millions are the Olympics' biggest source of income can recoup its investment only by not doing the one thing television does best: show history as it is being made. Canadian television, and television in other countries around the world, on the other hand, spend far less money in rights fees so it can afford to show the Games live. Go figure.

Well, Ebersol is gone now, but the news that NBC will retain the rights to the Olympics for the foreseeable future means that his legacy will continue. Both ESPN and Fox had promised to show the Games live, but it was not to be. The result is that Americans will continue to be the last country in the civilized world without universal health care and the last country not to see the Olympics live.

Ron Rapoport was a sportswriter and columnist for the Los AngelesTimes, Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times. His latest book, Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White, which he wrote with Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, is currently being adapted for the screen.

Opponents of a station at Constellation Blvd and Avenue of the Stars are not fighting fair in their zealous effort to kill the idea of the station where it will serve the most riders. While Metro has bent over backwards to make the station selection process as transparent as possible, a handful of misguided opponents of a station at Constellation Blvd has been playing fast and loose with the facts.

To date, the Beverly Hills school board, which is driving the "No on Constellation" campaign, has committed over $400,000 to a double barreled lobbying and PR effort to defeat the Constellation option. The truth about the limited scope and low risk of subway tunneling that would be required to reach Constellation, does not make it into the Board's press releases, talking points and Century City subway website. How and why the taxpayers of Beverly Hills have allowed the Board to spend education dollars on a PR campaign against a subway station is also unclear.

To Angelenos who do not ride Metro's trains and buses, where a Century City station is located is of little importance. But to those who do, and to the many more who might give Metro a try if the station and service were convenient, it is all about location, location, location. Choosing the best address matters because it translates into more transit riders who might otherwise be driving alone to work.

The school board has been careful to state that they are not against the Wilshire Subway Westside Extension. Regrettably none of that same caution has gone into the board's effort to be truthful about Constellation. Shameless in its ongoing campaign to discredit Metro's engineering and outreach, the board has been shameful in its personal attacks on Metro staff and the agency's motivation and sincerity in seeking the best location for new stations. Given the importance of the outcome of this fight, here are some of the facts omitted from the school board's Century City station sales brochure:

• Metro is considering building a station at Constellation Blvd because it is projected to serve the highest number of riders out of three station locations being considered.


• Subway construction to reach the Constellation Blvd option would require tunneling under a portion of the Beverly Hills High School property and a small number of homes in south Beverly Hills.


• Tunneling, regardless of the station location selected, will be conducted in a manner that minimizes risks to the public. The Beverly Hills tunneling is no more difficult than countless other subway construction projects that have been successfully undertaken around the world in recent years.


• Constellation Blvd is not a bait and switch tactic designed by Metro to win a station location the agency had in mind from the start. The location suggestion came out of the transparent community outreach process which included a series of community meetings in Beverly Hills and elsewhere along the proposed route.


• Metro is not doing the Century City developers' bidding in proposing a station at Constellation.


• A subway tunnel under a portion of the Beverly Hills High School property will not increase the risk of a terrorist attack on the school. A subway that passes under the high school site will not pose a danger to students and staff at the school.

The time has come to set the record straight on the risks and benefits of building a station at Constellation Blvd.

Joel Epstein is a Westside resident, Metro customer, and strategic communications consultant focused on transportation and other critical urban issues. Website