Personalizing History: Betty Reid Soskin Remembers Port Chicago
February 27, 2010
It’s been a big month for Betty Reid Soskin, who, at 88, is the oldest ranger in the National Park Service and whose extraordinary life story is the focus of the final chapter of my new book.
She’s been featured recently in several TV and newspaper reports about legislation signed recently by President Barack Obama as part of an effort to bring renewed awareness to the worst home-front disaster of World War II, the horrific munitions explosion that killed 320 men— two-thirds of them African American— at Port Chicago, California on July 17, 1944.
The controversial mutiny that ensued after the disaster helped bring an end to the racial segregation of the U.S. military. The Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial, located on the Suisun Bay, will become a full unit of the National Park System, following approval by Congress. Here’s the raw footage of Betty’s interview with Rodney Speed about the explosion at Port Chicago for a segment of the evening news on WPIX-TV of San Francisco:
http://www.news10.net/video/#/Raw+Video%3A+Betty+Reid+talks+Port+Chicago+disaster/67549484001
For Betty, the tragedy is deeply personal. A dozen of the dead had attended a lemonade party at her house earlier in the day. “Each time I’m at the memorial site and re-positioned in that deceptively tranquil setting,” she wrote recently on her blog, “I can feel the presence of the unseen, and the stories flow and—it’s almost as though we’ve brought the life with us to this monument.”
Since the beginning of the year, Betty has accepted an invitation to receive an honorary doctorate and to deliver the commencement address to the graduating class of 2010 from the California College of the Arts. She has also agreed to take a role in a benefit performance of Eve Ensler’s award-winning “Vagina Monologues” in a production to be held in the historic Craneway Pavilion of Ford Point, Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park located in Richmond, California, near San Francisco. The proceeds will go to violence prevention programs in the city.
Sleep ‘n Learn
February 25, 2010
I’m up too late writing this, defying everything my mother ever told me about getting proper rest. A growing body of studies now supports her wisdom. Sleep is critical— and not just because it’s protective of our immune systems.
We already knew that depriving the brain of sleep has serious costs. Without sufficient sleep, learning isn’t consolidated into memory. Teens suffer a greater incidence of depression and suicidal thoughts. Creativity suffers from lack of sleep. And, chronically deprived of sleep, the brain will shrink.
Now, a new study has shown that sleep primes actually the brain to soak up new facts.
In the study, as reported in The New York Times, 20 healthy young adults asked to learn 100 faces and names at noon and another set at 6 p.m., with a 90 minute nap in between. Their scores improved, on average, by 10 percent. On the other hand, the scores of a similar group of 19 young adults that didn’t nap declined by 10 percent.
“You need sleep before learning, to prepare your brain, like a dry sponge, to absorb new information,” said Matthew P. Walker, the lead investigator of a study of 39 young adults presented on Feb. 21 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.
Farewell to Poet Lucille Clifton, 73, Her Voice and Hips
February 20, 2010
Lucille Clifton had one of those voices that rises from somewhere deeper than throat or chest, stomach or hips. Body and voice were one. And no, like her hips, Clifton, a National Book Award winner who died on Feb. 14, at 73, did not “fit into little/ petty places.”
Nor did her words, which she spoke directly to the listener, inflected with the blues and a head-wagging humor that forgives everything and nothing. Each drop of language revealed layers of personal, familial, and racial history. But as it did, it transcended the experience with vision. She transformed her immediate life into mythologies that, in turn, reverberated like depth charges with delayed truths of deeper places.
Before you read her obituary in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/arts/17clifton.html, listen to her read her “homage to my hips” via poets.org, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15599, or watch her at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival.
IN BOLD AGAIN: MARGIE STOLL RANKED #3 & WINS USATF HALF-MARATHON
February 10, 2010
Last May, U.S. Masters Champion runner Margie Stoll confessed (under duress), as I finished reporting for What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life?, that one of her craven goals was to be ranked among the top three 65+ U.S. women runners.
True to form, she wasted no time achieving her ambition. She’s ranked #3 in the Running Times Masters of the Year awards in the magazine’s March issue. She added to that accomplishment by finishing first in her age group on Feb. 7 in the USA Track & Field Half Marathon Championships in Melbourne, Florida, one of the nation’s most prominent races.
“I was very happy to move up from last year’s honorable mention status, if only to see my name in bolder print,” Margie said by phone.
A master of modesty as well, Margie downplayed her national half-marathon victory. “I had a disappointing race,” she said of her finish in 2 hour 32 second time, four minutes slower than last year but 10 minutes faster that her closest competitor.
Margie, of course, would never mention the strong winds that buffeted runners as they crossed two long bridges. “All the elite runners said their times were not as good as last year,” said Don Lein, chairman of the USATF Masters Long Distance Running Committee, who was in attendance.
With the help of his wife Marian, Lein is responsible the Running Times annual rankings based, he explained, on a compilation of on age-grade percentage— the percentage of the approximate world record level, the variety of distances run, the number of races, and a willingness to compete against championship-caliber runners in prestigious events.
Like all older elite runners, Margie’s challenge now is to lose as little time each years as possible. And, as she would say, to keep her name in bold type. Her many admirers have few doubts about her ability to do so. On the Nashville Striders message board, on Tuesday CharlieT wrote, “Margie, you are my hero!!! Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll stay in BOLD print.”
(See Excerpts. Click on Margie Stoll’s name.)
PLEASE HOLD THE SHAKE ‘N BURGER, PLEASE
February 9, 2010
Hold them, that is, if you want to avoid small areas of brain damage that can lead to problems with thinking and memory in later life. Instead, stick with a Mediterranean diet with a healthy dose of vegetables, legumes, fruits, cereals, fish, and monosaturated fatty acids such as olive oil, and go easy on the dairy products, meat and poultry, and saturated fatty acids. But you can keep that glass a wine.
So says a just-released study that assessed the diets of 712 people in New York and divided them into three groups based on how closely they were following the Mediterranean diet. Then they conducted MRI brain scans of the people an average of six years later. A total of 238 people had at least one area of brain damage.
The folks who stuck most closely to a Mediterranean-like diet were 36 percent less likely to have infarcts, small areas of brain damage, than those who wandered furthest from the diet. Those moderately following the diet were 21 percent less likely to have brain damage than the lowest group.
“In this study, not eating a Mediterranean-like diet had about the same effect on the brain as having high blood pressure,” said study author Nikolaos Scarmeas, MD, MSc, of Columbia University Medical Center in New York and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. The study will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto April 10 to April 17, 2010. Previous research by Scarmeas and his colleagues showed that a Mediterranean-like diet may be associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and may lengthen survival in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Exercise! Exercise! Exercise!
February 6, 2010
Some things can’t get clearer. Here’s one: Our bodies are meant to move. Seems self-evident, doesn’t it? Ten thousand years ago our ancestors traveled, on average, eight miles a day – by foot. Humans haven’t changed all that much since then. But glued to our chairs, mesmerized by our beloved screens, we grow increasingly sedentary and at risk.
The New York Times recently reported on two studies that underscore why turning off the tube and getting our bodies in gear is imperative. (See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/health/26beha.html.)
The first study, published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association in January, followed 8,800 people, 25 and older, for six and a half years. It found that each hour of television watched daily was associated with an 18 percent increase in deaths from heart disease and an 11 percent increase in mortality rates overall. Make that four hours or more a day, and it’s 80 percent more likely that TV watching and everything else will stop— with death caused by cardiovascular disease.
But if we activate ourselves, even in later life, we can turn things around. In a study published in Archives of Internal Medicine, 155 women ages 65 to 75 were put into one of two groups: one did strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week while a control group did balance and toning exercises.
A year later, the women who did strength training improved their performance on tests of “executive function,” such cognitive skills as planning, making decisions, and completing a task without getting distracted, by between 10.9 and 12.6 percent. Scores for women in the control group, on the other hand, declined slightly.
Moreover, in September, an Israeli study found that people over age 70 live longer and better if physically active at least four hours a week. Physically active seniors were 31% to 58% less likely to die during the study than their sedentary peers, and 72% to 92% more likely to remain independent while performing the activities of daily living. The Jerusalem Longitudinal Cohort Study, which followed 1,821 people born in 1920 and 1921 for 18 years, from ages 70 to 88, also found that seniors who started physical activity, even between ages 78 and 85, improved their odds of survival.