The Whys and Wherefores of the Current Neighborhood of Oak Park

Whither Oak Park? Part 2

2009-11-03T22:17:58Z

Continued from part one....read part one here

Well, things didn’t quite work out that way. We married then quickly divorced, but not before my husband got his green card; I worked for Wired magazine in San Francisco, then left the magazine after two years to work full time as a freelancer once again. It was a rough life, made even rougher by my crazy landlord of seven years plotting to find “legal” ways to evict me. I was in the midst of fighting her insane legal efforts, when I got word that I had been awarded the Knight International Press Fellowship to Uganda in 2003. I promptly dropped my counter-suit against my loony landlady, Manuela, moved back to Sacramento, met my long-time boyfriend while was tending bar at my new, local favorite hangout, Joe Marty’s, and proceeded to prepare for nine months in Uganda, and beyond.

Well, we already know what happened next - the bad motorcycle accident and broken ankle which dumped me back in Sacramento. Except that I made one more run at Africa in 2005; I tried to go to Zimbabwe as a foreign journalist, stay under the radar of President Mugabe, who had banned all foreign journalists, and spent most of my short time there travelling back and forth across the border to South Africa, to renew my “tourist’s” visa every two weeks. I was ignominiously kicked out of the country after less than a month.

I returned to the arms of my boyfriend Ken, and the erstwhile charms of Sacramento. I was depressed, once again. It was too early for me to be back in the States, let alone Sacramento, and even though I loved my boyfriend, I hated my life and even his perennially bachelor-pad town house.

So when we were forced to move from it, you would think I would have been overjoyed. I was and I wasn’t. I didn’t like having to find a house on our budget in a few weeks, and I was in no physical condition to move since my car accident in 2006 had left me practically disabled. So I “let” my mom and boyfriend do all the work, I practically just sat on my ass and did nothing while they did everything.

So, here I was, still in Sacramento, still depressed and in despair and chronic pain, and wondering what the hell I was doing in Oak Park. It wasn’t nearly as cool as midtown, or so I thought, I didn’t take to my neighbors right away, and they didn’t take to me, and I fought with my boyfriend constantly. Largely over the fact that I would mostly sit around and watch TV and movies, and write the very occasional freelance piece for the Sacramento News & Review.

Well a few pivotal things happened to me recently that have literally turned my life around. A few months ago, my boyfriend of seven years moved out on me. That fact alone turned me back on myself; now, I had only myself to blame for my misery and isolation. So I started going out around the neighborhood by myself, mostly on my bike. I met great local merchants and friendly, local restaurateurs. I got to know my closest neighbors, who are all kind and trustworthy. I discovered the local budding, artist’s and gallery community, centering around such venerable exhibition spaces as the 40 Acres Gallery, and the Brickhouse, both on Broadway, a few blocks from where I live. I discovered an old friend had moved nearby, so close that we would ride our bikes to each other’s houses and hang out.

I also began to observe a very ambivalent vibe that I think might be exclusive to Oak Park. For example, the people who live in the houses of Oak Park are by and large, friendly, upstanding, and law-abiding citizens. But some aren’t, like the neighborhood kid who nearly ran me over with his flash Mercedes Benz, running through a stop sign, while I was on my bike in the intersection. He got out of his car, called me a bitch, pushed me, then grabbed my cell phone and threw it on the ground, breaking it. As he drove off, he threatened to “get me," if he saw me again. I memorized his license plate number and reported him to the police. They were very polite to me about it, but not terribly concerned about the threat, and said they would drive around for a while looking for him and that was about it. My guess is that they felt they have better things to pursue in Oak Park, and they are probably right. But their relatively au fait attitude towards the incident was rather off-putting, and I can understand the locals not liking the local beat cops in this neighborhood.

Then there are some merchants around here who are just plain mean. For example, the folks at Food Source, the only major food store in the area, refuse to serve certain folks who want to buy things from them. My local friends have been approached by apparently homeless men, who sleep sometimes in the empty lot across from Food Source. These men have asked my friends to take their money and go in and buy things for them, as Food Source will not take their business, even though they have the money, are bothering no one, are full dressed, and recently, at least, bathed.

I think that attitude on the part of Food Source’s management is disgusting.

Also, Food Source apparently has its own little police patrol car/private army, and policemen, perpetually parked in front of the store, whose beat is solely to protect Food Source from what, exactly? Homeless men who want to buy food there? An anticipated riot among local youths in the cereal aisle? I couldn’t guess, but I think the mere fact that Food Source and the Sacramento Police Department deem it necessary to keep a police car parked permanently out in front of the Food Source, is pathetic and revolting. I would even go so far as to recommend that locals boycott Food Source for that very reason, if not dozen’s of others, too numerous to mention.

Happily, I have found that most local merchants are nothing like Food Source. They are friendly, courteous, and law-abiding, in that they happily serve anyone who has the money and the proper attire.

So, I actually dig Oak Park. I am happy that they are getting rid of the local Starbucks on Broadway, to be replaced by a much more apt food and coffee joint called Soul Power. Every day, without fail, someone in my neighborhood, usually someone I don’t know, waves hello as I ride or drive by. The prices on most local merchandise can’t be beat. And strangers regularly try to turn you into friends.

I hope the admirable new mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, has great development plans for Oak Park. We all know he owns property here, and apparently makes his early morning jog through here, so we can have high expectations for his intentions for this neighborhood. I tried to get a hold of him and/or his communications director, Joaquim, before my deadline, but to no avail.

So I turned to perhaps even better sources on the prospects of Oak Park, past, present and future. A handful of local business owners and residents that work right around the corner from me.

The first is the handsome, charismatic, strapping owner of Kidd’s Gym on Second Avenue, Charles Kidd.

Kidd is not from Oak Park, and indeed not even from Sacramento; he comes from South Carolina originally. But he has become a de facto local leader and inspiration, especially among the youth of Oak Park.

A former college wide receiver, Kidd has worked in the Oak Park division of the Sacramento City Parks and Recreation Department for many years, mostly in the Physical Education department. He has been one of the people in charge of many local, after-school phys-ed programs for local high school students like those from Sacramento High, and he has now extended his interest in physical education, in particular with regard to the training of talented, local high school athletes, through his very own business, Kidd’s Gym.

He explains his success with these “surrogate children” of his simply. “You get what you give; I give them respect, they give me respect back." This can be a bit of a surprise in the current cultural atmosphere where parents and teachers of his “kids," are more permissive, and are more likely to want to be their friends, than to earn their respect. Kidd thinks this is a huge mistake. “You are not going to get a kid to pay attention to your position of authority of any kind, if you don’t command it in the right way."

I haven’t even mentioned the most amazing thing about 51-year-old, apparently tireless, Kidd. In addition to having raised six children of his own, he is currently the foster father of four teenage boys. They came to him from troubled backgrounds; now they are all good students and talented athletes. Why does he do it? Hasn’t he paid his fatherhood dues? Well, he says, “I learned by being raised by a good community.” I asked him if he meant that it “takes a village to raise a child.” “No, I mean that I was raised right by my mother, my grandmother, and other members of my family and I feel that I can pass on those values and help these kids.” He does so, by the way, as a single parent; he is not currently married. You ladies out there, pay attention!

Then there are the husband-and-wife local entrepreneurs and residents of Oak Park, Linda and Eddie Hill, who run a second-hand furniture and appliance business out of their property at 3940 Broadway, called Broadway Plaza. I call Linda and Eddie entrepreneurs, and they certainly are that, managing various Oak Park properties and other property-related services. But really, they are the “missionaries” of Oak Park, without the bible-thumping beat that might otherwise drown out their message.

“We do what we do, really, not to make money, but to help people,” say’s Linda, a handsome, witty, middle-aged woman with two kids, who is originally from Long Island, New York. Somehow, she made her way out to Sacramento and eventually Oak Park. She and her husband Eddie have lived and worked in Oak Park for nearly 15 years. She has high hopes for the future of Oak Park, but remembers when, only about ten years ago, the crime in her neighborhood in Oak Park was so bad, that she was afraid to sit on her own front porch, even during the day, because of the random gunplay and gang warfare nearby.

In spite of that experience, she will always have faith in the inherent goodness of people. Sometimes she gets “rewarded” for that faith by unwittingly welcoming a bad, law-breaking tenant into one of her rental properties in the neighborhood. She can, as she says, be “too soft-hearted,” when people come to her with their sob stories. She will give people breaks on rent, breaks on furniture, appliances and knick knacks they need for their home – she will even let people pay in installments, just so they can go home that day with a bed to sleep on or an oven to cook in.

By her estimation, she and her husband have helped furnish over 24 homes in Oak Park for families that have very little money. And she always makes sure that they are getting clean, high quality, working items. Also, by her estimation, she has helped provide at least 34 Oak Park families with computers that had none before. She sells them the whole computer set up at an amazingly discounted price, and loads the computer with her own software, so they don’t have to buy it themselves.

It’s the kids involved in these scenarios that she is most moved by. “A LOT of kids in this community don’t have access to computers in their homes, and everyone should have that. It’s become essential,” like having a working toilet, or some such.

And now, here is my final, emotional and spiritual and journalistic connection I would like to make between the relevancy of my experience in the “new” South Africa, and living here in Oak Park. In both places, there is a sense of expectation, of hope, of ambition, of dreams that can come true, where before there was none. For me, personally, as I discover Oak Park in my solitary perambulations, I feel the same sense of newness, of wonder at things never seen or experienced before, and of people of a certain, lovely, singular character that I had never come across before. When I sent to South Africa at that crucial time in its history, I saw and experienced wondrous things, good and bad, but mostly good. And that is exactly how I feel about my “discovery” of Oak Park as it is right now. It is a place in transition. And it is heading in a direction that I believe is for the better.

Whither Oak Park? Part 1

2009-11-03T22:14:24Z

I am year-and-a-half resident of Oak Park. I have lived here that long, at first very reluctantly, then somewhat ambivalently, and now, finally with great enthusiasm.

The initial reluctance I blame more on myself, my circumstances in moving here, and my sluggish, even inert, bare involvement in the actual moving process. My then-boyfriend and I had been served notice by his landlord, that they were selling his townhouse in midtown Sacramento soon; we had very, very little time to find a new, comfortable, and appropriate place to live.

We are both underpaid freelancers of a sort; he is a bartender/house painter/will be-something-more-fulfilling later in life. I am an avowed, diehard, almost lifelong freelance journalist. I have lived and worked abroad, primarily in Africa, and never, ever expected to come back to my hometown, Sacramento, for any great length of time - other than the obligatory holiday and family visits. But a serious of vehicular accidents that I was involved in and seriously injured in, the first in a motorcycle accident in Uganda in 2004, then a near-death car accident at 11:30 am on December 26th, 2006, in the suburban neighborhood of my mother’s house in El Dorado Hills, left me, on both occasions, crippled, though temporarily, both physically and emotionally.

After the Uganda accident, where I shattered my ankle while on the fourth month of a nine-month Knight International Press Fellowship, I was summarily requested, by my sponsors, to return to the States to rehabilitate properly.

The rehabilitation part was easy. The ignominious return to Sacramento was very, very hard. I moved in with my then very new-boyfriend, did my physical therapy perfunctorily, and not much else for about six months. After all, I hadn’t planned on coming back. Not to Sacramento and maybe not back to the States. Ever.

But there I was living in midtown, a nice, jivey, area in downtown Sac, with close, world class restaurants, clubs and shops, and a very kindly, patient, attentive, and handsome boyfriend. So things weren’t ALL that bad, right?

Well, I got it into my head that I wasn’t finished with Africa, and it wasn’t finished with me. This in spite of the fact, that after I had achieved a master’s in journalism in 1991, I promptly took off for South Africa, in the wake of the release of Nelson Mandela, expecting great things for the “new” South Africa, and for myself, a relatively untried, first-time freelance foreign correspondent. I went over there very fecklessly; I had no contacts and no media outlet guarantees. I gave myself six months to make a go of it. After I managed to not starve in those first six months, mostly through the incredible largesse of local friends I made almost immediately, both black and white, both in the business of journalism and outside of it, I decided to give it (southern Africa) two more years. I KNEW that the country’s first, free, and fair democratic elections were coming, and I had to be there to witness that.

Well, that day came and went, not without disruptive, awful violence, some of which hit close to home; one photographer friend of mine, Ken Oosterbrook, talented, dedicated, and crazy-brave, was hit by “friendly fire,” meaning the South African Defense Force, and was killed, during a live shoot-out between the SADF and some black township dwellers.

Another acquaintance, Greg Marinovich, was also shot that same day, but survived and recovered completely. He went on to write about that and other exploits of members of the so-called “Bang-Bang Club," a band of local photographers who kept their ears to the police radio waves, paged each other, night and day, and tracked the violent outbreaks, wherever they might be, whenever they might occur, 24-7. Doing so had won Marinovich a Pulitzer, for taking the photograph of a live “necklacing” in a township. A necklacing is when a mob of angry township dwellers, affiliated with either the Inkatha Freedom Party or the opposing African National Congress party, would clash, single out a primary conspirator, throw a rubber car tire around his neck, light it on fire and dance around in glee while they watched him burn to death.

Marinovich took this photo, did not intervene with the necklacing process, either to protest it, or stop it, won the Pulitzer Prize Award, and never looked back. That was all well and good, as those seasoned war journalists among us knew that we were not the story, we were the story-tellers; no matter how horrific the things were that happened before us, we generally did not intervene; the thinking was that the greater contribution would be to get the story or photo of the horrific event out there in the world at large. That way, change would likely take place on a larger scale, for the greater good. It was Machiavellian, I know, and I’m not sure I was always good at adhering to that principle, but I NEVER judged those who did.

Unfortunately, those outside the fairly rarified world of war correspondents, often did. That was apparently, in large part, the cause of the death by suicide of another member of the “Bang-Bang Club,” Kevin Carter, also a good friend of mine at one time.

It was just three months or so after Carter had won the Pulitzer Prize for that now infamous photo he took of a tiny refugee girl in the Sudan, crawling vainly towards a feeding station, while a vulture stalked her over her shoulder.

Carter was a much more emotional and empathetic war photographer than his buddy, Greg Marinovich. Nevertheless, as he told us friends back in Jo-Burg, he did what was expected of him; took the photograph, then sat down, unmoving for a time, torn with emotion, but did not otherwise intervene. It was almost certain the little Sudanese girl would be dead within hours, with or without the feeding station or Carter’s intervention. So he finished up his assignment in the Sudan, and flew back to Jo-Burg.

Not long after that, he was informed that he had won the Pulitzer for that photo. We were all overjoyed on his behalf. He was a chronically underpaid, underecognized, courageous local talent and this was to be his big break.

Instead, it turned out to be his downfall. The whirlwind attention of states-side editors and interviewers, most of whom had little or no experience with actual war reporting themselves, began to pressure Carter with questions like “ What did you do, when you saw the dying little girl?” “Didn’t you pick her up and carry her to the food station?” “Didn’t you at least shoo away the vulture?” “Didn’t you try to save her somehow?”

But Kevin had done none of those things. Those of us in Jo-Burg knew this, because he told us so. He was among friends and like-minded colleagues with us; we did not expect him to do anything more than he did, which was to take a spectacular, world-changing, award-winning photo, and then move on to document the next calamity, the next unbearable injustice.

Nevertheless, the scrutinizing and judgmental international press and media were not satisfied with the true account of events. They hounded and pressured Carter, who was already somewhat emotionally fragile, until he finally began telling a different version of what happened that day in the Sudan. The more he was hounded and judged, the more his story morphed. First, it was that he had shooed away the vulture. Then, it was that picked up the little girl and carried her to the feeding station. Finally, it was he had carried her to the feeding station, and then went and sat under a nearby tree and cried for hours over the trauma. Of course, none of that happened. But the new versions shut up his critics. (One judgmental ass had even had the nerve to write to the New York Times, criticizing Carter and the paper for printing the photo).

When Carter came back from his whirlwind, stateside press tour, he did not exactly get a heroes’ welcome. It wasn’t his fault really, I mean really, whom, except for maybe someone like Marinovich, could have been inured to the criticism and questioning surrounding the circumstances of his actions? We at home in Jo-burg were not upset that he HADN’T intervened with the dying little girl. We were disappointed that Carter, who was too sensitive by far to do what he did and see what he saw, day-in and day-out, had felt the need to change his story to get the ravenous critics off his back.

Soon thereafter, Carter, already prone to abusing alcohol and drugs, fell into a profound tailspin. He got great assignments and well-paid jobs from prestigious news agencies after his award, but he kept screwing up even the simplest assignment. Towards the end of his life, he was sent to take some very straightforward photos at a regular press conference in Mozambique. He went, took the photos, and came back. But when he got off the plane in Jo-Burg, he couldn’t find his rolls of film. He panicked, he went into a kind of shock, he called all his friends to arms to help him find the photos, but he couldn’t locate them anywhere. Embarrassed and ashamed that he, a veteran war photographer, had screwed up such an easy assignment, he turned to more drugs and alcohol and sank into a deep despair.

He started calling around to his friends, saying that he was depressed and suicidal. (At the time, I was in the US with my then fiancé, who was also a friend of Carter’s. So we didn’t get the suicide threats, though he had once threatened to commit suicide to me, when I broke things off with him after a brief affair). He had attempted it once, at the age of 19, trying to escape conscription into the SADF, but was thankfully saved. Since that time, he had threatened to follow-through successfully, but nobody really believed him at this point; he had threatened before and NOT done it, and besides, he’d just won the Pulitzer; it seemed he had everything to live for; his bright, new future, and his beautiful four-year-old daughter. Not to mention the load of female groupies he had collected around the world after winning the Pulitzer.

Nonetheless, the other pressures were too great for him. A few days after announcing once again he was going to commit suicide, this time he did it. He was found in his beloved, old red pick-up truck, asphyxiated in the cab of his truck with a garden hose tied to the back of the tail pipe of his running car, which he had driven to a favorite, childhood park. Beside him was a bottle of alcohol and letters he had written to various friends and family. My fiancé and I found out about his death, while reading an Associated Press news story in the Sacramento Bee.

Aahh, the reader is saying about now. Finally a return to the designated subject for this story contest, however indirectly, through mention of the Sacramento Bee.

And it is a genuine return to that subject, though, perhaps alas, not immediate. You see, when I read about my friend’s death in my hometown newspaper, all it made me want to do was return at once to South Africa. But my fiancé and I were on assignment, and could not. So, we missed Carter’s funeral, and were very sad about that. When we returned to South Africa, finally, it was a changed place, in both good and bad ways. The good ways were obvious; Mandela had just been elected president, and apartheid was officially “over.” The bad ways were more subtle; the mainstream media decided that the “hot” African story was now elsewhere, and it largely, to a person, picked up their temporary bureau headquarters, including CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times and many, many others, and moved their southern African bureaus elsewhere.

But I, naïve, sucker that I am, wanted to stay on in South Africa. Yeah, the “big’ story was over, Mandela had been elected with a modicum of fuss and violence (which greatly disappointed a number of foreign journalists) but I still thought there were stories to be told and published. So I stayed on another three years, covering wars in Mozambique and Rwanda, interviewing five African “dictator’s” for a book project, and then finally deciding to leave my base in Jo-burg, when my fiancé urged us to move back to the States, where I would publish our book and he would start a new career as a fashion photographer.

This is part one in a two part series to be continued.....