I am interested in the suggestion that the city’s major water polo facility as a factor in the low crime and gang rates for the area, despite the fact surrounding areas are rife with gang activity.

Few places have Commerce’s water polo heritage or infrastructure. The city has a median family income of only $34,040, but children play water polo free year-round in a $20 million facility built with water polo in mind. The pool is designed to Olympic specifications and occasionally hosts the national team.

The city pays for its youth players to take bus trips to tournaments, their entry fees and for pool time. All a child needs is a bathing suit — and the cost of that is sometimes covered by booster clubs.

“We’re surrounded by areas prevalent in gangs and we’re very fortunate we don’t have gang problems in Commerce,” said Jim Jimenez, the director of parks and recreation, who has worked in the department for 35 years. “Our kids are kept busy in swim lessons and water polo and other things. It’s a community effort and it shows.”

The positive outcomes in investing in the children of the community, by offering them both financial and municipal support are quite evident here. The overall cost of the facilities, labor, and supplies may seem like a lot, but if we factor in the costs that would have gone into battling gang activity and dealing with the consequences, I’m sure more people would be attune to this idea of preventative interaction.

June 18, 2008
Water Polo’s Premier Springboard
By PETE THAMEL
COMMERCE, Calif. — The most improbable American water polo pipeline began here one generation and four trash cans ago when a coach wanted to give her youth swim team a rest.

To break the monotony of training, the coach, Sandy Nitta, plopped four trash cans into the pool to serve as makeshift water polo goals.

Fast forward 30 years. Commerce, a working-class industrial city of 12,500 southeast of Los Angeles, has developed one of the most prolific and sophisticated youth water polo programs in the United States. The city employs two full-time and three part-time youth water polo coaches and spends more than $250,000 a year on its programs.

“It’s not a rich community, but what the city has done for water polo there has opened so many doors,” said Nitta, a former Olympic swimmer who now coaches youth water polo teams in Las Vegas.

With the United States women favored to win their first Olympic gold medal in water polo this summer in Beijing, two Commerce alumnae are part of the backbone of the team. Fittingly, the captain Brenda Villa and the sniper Patty Cardenas are so appreciative of the doors that the Commerce youth program opened for them that their ultimate goal is to play well enough to open doors for others.

Villa understands that the explosive growth of women’s soccer and softball in the United States was fueled by the gold medals the national teams won in Atlanta in 1996. She is eager to see if water polo gold, which the United States won at the 2007 Pan American Games, will lead to more trash cans being dropped into swimming pools throughout the country.

“It’s our country and our culture — it’s gold or it doesn’t matter,” said Villa, 28, who has earned bronze and silver medals in the last two Olympics. “To me, it’s my hope to bring home that gold medal. Then we’ll see. We’ll see if that’s what we needed all along to get our sport to be a national sport, not a California sport.”

Few places have Commerce’s water polo heritage or infrastructure. The city has a median family income of only $34,040, but children play water polo free year-round in a $20 million facility built with water polo in mind. The pool is designed to Olympic specifications and occasionally hosts the national team.

The city pays for its youth players to take bus trips to tournaments, their entry fees and for pool time. All a child needs is a bathing suit — and the cost of that is sometimes covered by booster clubs.

“We’re surrounded by areas prevalent in gangs and we’re very fortunate we don’t have gang problems in Commerce,” said Jim Jimenez, the director of parks and recreation, who has worked in the department for 35 years. “Our kids are kept busy in swim lessons and water polo and other things. It’s a community effort and it shows.”

Villa and Cardenas are first-generation Mexican-Americans. Cardenas’s parents and Villa’s mother have roots in the Mexican town of Tecalitlán. In Commerce, their mothers worked as cleaners, and Villa and Cardenas stumbled into water polo by tagging along with their older brothers. Before long, their weekends were crammed with as many as 10 games. The pool became their social hub.

“It was the thing to do,” Villa said.

Villa competed with and against boys at Bell Gardens High School, enduring plenty of snide comments. But the competition only improved her game, helping her develop the smarts and instincts that have contributed to her becoming one of the best players in the world despite being just 5 feet 4 inches.

“She’s small,” United States Coach Guy Baker said. “But she makes up for it with intelligence and being deceptively strong for her size.”

Villa, who played at Stanford, is a celebrity in Commerce, and is called upon to appear for Cinco de Mayo, Fourth of July and Mexican independence day celebrations.

Villa is so revered that when Cardenas spoke recently to a fifth-grade class in Commerce, the first question was, “Do you know Brenda Villa?” When Cardenas laughed and answered yes, the students, in unison, said, “Wow!”

“Their inspiration is immeasurable,” said Gabriel Martinez, one of the city’s full-time youth water polo coaches. “We ask the girls before the season who their heroes are, in and out of the water. One hundred percent say Brenda and Patty.”

Bell Gardens formed a girls water polo program when Cardenas, who is 23, was a freshman. By the time she graduated, the team had won four California Interscholastic Federation titles and lost just three games.

Like Villa, Cardenas spent her childhood playing with boys and being toughened up by her older brothers. One brother, Ivan, would kneel on her arms to execute something he called the Happy Slapper, which involved him slapping her face until she screamed for help.

Cardenas became so tough that after the webbing between her toes was ripped open during a youth game, she insisted on being taped up so she could continue playing.

Now a senior at Southern California, Cardenas will be playing in her first Olympics. She plans to continue competing through the London Games in 2012.

Water polo may be a fixture in Commerce, but it is not nearly as popular in the rest of the United States. None of the members of the women’s national team have the individual sponsorships that are common in swimming, soccer and gymnastics.

The team’s training headquarters is on a military base in Los Alamitos, Calif., a step down from the facility in Commerce. As the national team finished practice there one day recently, children paddled around on kickboards for swim lessons. The backdrop includes soldiers running and shouting, “I don’t know what I’ve been told,” and the constant reverberations from landing helicopters.

“We feel very safe there,” Cardenas said, smiling.

The spartan facility is a window into the sometimes thankless world of Olympic training. The United States Olympic Committee pays each athlete $2,500 a month, which does not support a glamorous Southern California existence.

“Obviously, we’re not in this sport to make money,” said Villa, who has played professionally in Sicily. “I’m grateful. It paid for school and I’ve traveled the world playing this sport. I think if more people knew how cool and special and unique the sport is, more people would play.

“But we’re not in it to be Shaq or Kobe status,” she added.

For now, Villa and Cardenas will settle for having that level of status in Commerce, for being contributors to an impressive legacy that sprung from the humblest of beginnings.

“The program there has just boomed,” Nitta said. “Every major youth national championship, whatever age group it is, Commerce is right up there.”

She paused and smiled. “And it all started with trash cans,” she said.

Reading this article serves to solidify the thoughts that have been running in my head in the last few months. Three years after graduation, I am only beginning to understand and learn to appreciate the efforts of my parents.

Yes, I’m still lazy. Yes, I still believe that I can find a job that satisfies me both financially and spiritually. But a growing part of me realizes that adulthood is bittersweet and perhaps anti-climatic. When I grow up, I want to be able to support my parents.  In reality, they’ll live out their lives comfortably; however, to have the ability to do so financially as well as emotionally is a comforting thought to me.

When you weren’t looking, they were working
Ben Stein
June 8, 2008 New York Times

MOST business journalism is about investments and the people who make them, usually on a large scale. Or else it is about the big dogs who run the mighty earldoms of American business and the agencies that regulate them. This is fair enough. As Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.”

We all want to read about money and how it’s made and lost. But for young people who might have no idea of what business involves, or even what work beyond flipping burgers or selling DVDs might mean, here is a little primer on what it is and why it means something as Father’s Day approaches.

A few days ago, I came across a draft of a memoir my father was working on before he entered immortality in 1999. After reading it carefully, I realized that I knew almost everything in it except for one huge thing: how hard his work — his “business,” as one might say, for it surely kept him “busy” — had been for a number of years in middle age.

To me, as a child and as a teenager, in Silver Spring, Md., he simply got up in the morning, packed his briefcase and went to a fine office at Connecticut Avenue and K Street in Washington — or, if he had business in New York, he packed his suitcase and went to the train after work. When he came home, he had stories about the elegant restaurants he had tried near his office, maybe Duke Zeibert’s or Harvey’s, or, if he had gone to New York, about his room at the St. Regis at 55th Street and Fifth Avenue and how outrageous it was ($30 a night), and how his sleeper car on the train had not really allowed him much sleep.

He never, and I mean never, talked about making money, and he always seemed to have enough of it for a middle-class or maybe upper-middle-class lifestyle. So, frankly, I just assumed that he was having a good time down at his office and was secure and happy in his work.

His memoir told a different tale. There were arguments and power struggles at the Committee for Economic Development, where he was research director. (It was and is an organization of high-ranking business people who put out papers on social and economic issues. My father, for about 20 years starting in the mid-1940s, was the author of many of these papers.) Yes, my father was able to socialize with the heads of the major corporations in America and live on an expense account the way they did, but it was always clear who was the boss. Yes, he got to fly first class, but it was always a struggle to be shown some respect by certain of his colleagues and he often considered quitting.

He also wondered, if he quit, what he would do next and how he would pay the bills, and he did not want his children to have to worry about money, as he did when he was a child of the Great Depression.

I think of this as I shlep through the airport security line with my heavy bags (Willy Loman style), as crazy people sit in front of me on the plane, trying to break my nose by throwing their seatbacks onto me, and as I wake up early to travel to the next destination. Then, as I look at all the other middle-aged (and sometimes older) road warriors in the security line, on the plane or checking into the hotel, I think of our children in school.

I picture our kids bravely taking moral stands on global warming and the polar bears, refusing to “sell out,” get a job or learn anything useful. I think of what I could write to them about their parents’ work. I would start with a short phrase from Hart Crane, the genius poet.

O, brilliant kids, I was a fool just like you. I was in my mid-40s before I properly thanked my father for his decades of hard work — paying for me to laze around in the cars he bought me, to get drunk in the frat house whose dues he paid, to spend the afternoons with my girlfriends looking at trees and rivers while Pop worked and got so anxious that he took up smoking three packs of Kents a day.

O, brilliant kids, you get to put on the garments of the morally righteous and upstanding while your parents work — because mothers work now and always have worked — and your parents must say, ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ to those who hire them. O, golden children, you get to talk about how you’ll never ‘sell out,’ and meanwhile your parents stay up late in torment, thinking of how they can pay your tuition. Because, brilliant kids, work (business) involves exhaustion and eating humble pie and going on even when you think you can’t. And you are the beneficiaries of it in your gilded youth.

Be smarter than Ben Stein ever was. Be a better person than I ever was. Right now, today, thank your parents for working to support you. Don’t act as if it’s the divine right of students. Get right up in their faces and say, ‘Thank you for what you do so I can live like this.’ Say something. Say it, so that when they’re at O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth and they’ve just learned that their flight is canceled and they’ll have to stay overnight at the airport, they will know you appreciate them.
Get it in your heads that if you throw away your moral duties to your parents, you are thieves. You were born on third base and your parents put you there, and you think you hit a triple. It’s not true. It’s time to give back.

`Attention must be paid,’ as Arthur Miller said. So start now, and make it a habit to be grateful to your parents. Say you’re grateful and mean it. Do it now, however young or old you are. Do it on Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, every day.

How I wish I had done more of it. Now it’s too late — but it’s never too early.

A few years back there was a very good episode on Unconditional Love. Act One (27 minutes, starts at 9:24), entitled “Love is a battlefield,” dealt with the story the Solomons. They adopt Daniel, who was raised in a Romanian orphanage and up until his adoption, was deprived of emotional contact. The story concerns Daniel Solomon’s subsequent attachment disorder - which manifests itself into violence - and how the Solomons, mainly Heidi, try to deal with this.

The act “ends” with Daniel being voted by his synagogue as the most outstanding student in their confirmation class. More interestingly, however, are Heidi’s last words on Daniel’s transformation. Although she loves him - which is evident through all the emotional and physical abuse she has put up with during this period of time - her expectations are modest. Heidi believes that it is impossible to teach love. She wants Daniel just to form emotional bonds with others.

When asked if she feels loved by her son, she responds “I feel loved by Daniel…I don’t think he wants to hurt me, I don’t worry about that at all.” The modesty of this statement is interpreted as a form of strength. Making someone love you is much harder than making someone live peacefully with you. While it may seem somewhat tragic, I agree that it isn’t tragic at all.

This episode was broadcast in 2005, so I always wondered what happened to the Solomon family since then. Then, when I was at home, I was idly flipping through mom’s Reader’s Digest. So what do I find but an article on the Solomons? While true to the enthusiastic tone of all Reader’s Digest articles, it’s a good follow-up and promising future for the family.

Shouldn’t it be “Hired for the Boss’ Bed?”

“The Italian Billionaire’s Pregnant Wife….” what?

“Bedded for the Italian’s Pleasure.” Who is The Italian? Is he the only Italian left on earth, after some hideous disease that wiped out all the other Italians?

“Taken by her Greek Boss:” Clearly, Cathy Williams is a rebel. NO ITALIANS HERE!

“The sheikh’s convenient virgin;” Because all the other virgins were somewhere else, rendering them inconvenient.

HAHA, CLEVER.

However, I shouldn’t be laughting too hard; the romance novel genre is a billion-dollar industry.