Archive / Articles
Please come join us for a fun,free, summer breakfast in the park!
Last year, Jan Stroosma escaped from Alcatraz. Next up, he’s headed to Canada. But Jan “Sam” Stroosma is no outlaw—he’s a swimmer. What’s more, he prefers to dip in icy waters.
After diving into Naples Bay with some friends a few summers ago, Stroosma discovered his preference for chilly currents. “Everyone left, and I remember thinking, ‘I feel fine’—I prefer it,” he says.
Whereas most outdoor swimmers might find themselves stuck waiting for summer to arrive, Stroosma now swims regularly in the winter months. “The colder the better,” he says.
But don’t expect to see Stroosma in a wetsuit. He rolls without one, relying solely on his trusty Endurance Speedo. “I don’t need a wetsuit,” he declares. “I am one.”
Stroosma’s polar plunges are more than just an unusual hobby—cold-water swimming is a calming ritual he takes quite seriously. “I jump in somewhere around Naples and immediately swim as deep as I can until everything stops,” he explains. “When you finally come back up, it’s like you’re waking up again; everything else subsides.”
Unfortunately, however, Stroosma, along with many other Long Beach swimmers, has been unable to swim as often as he’d like to in Naples recently due to the high levels of bacteria. The need for awareness about the city’s pollution problems is something Stroosma strives to initiate among fellow swimmers.
“I want to start a bay swim club for other swimmers in Long Beach,” he says. Stroosma envisions the club actively working to make a difference by cleaning up both the city’s beaches and its waters.
“I just want to enjoy the bay,” he adds.
Last summer, Stroosma’s chilly infatuation led him to a swimming race near Alcatraz Island. Later this year, he’ll head up to Toronto for another frigid adventure. “The best month to swim is January,” he says. Why? “You just gotta try for yourself!” // LOUIE HUESMANN
There was a time back in high school when Kurt Simonson knew very little about how to even use a camera. Today, as a professional artist and professor of photography at Biola University, he wouldn’t be able to forget it if he tried.
Growing up in Minnesota, Simonson’s passion for photography started with his mentor/friend Dave. Through their friendship, he came to understand the role community plays in snapping pictures.
“Good art is all about community,” the Long Beach resident says. “[Art] is a strange thing. It’s selfish in a way, yet can be enjoyed by others. It’s like giving someone a gift they didn’t ask for.”
Shortly after learning the craft himself, Simonson began mentoring young, aspiring photographers, eventually leading to a career in teaching photography.
“I have a lot more passion for working with other people than on my own,” he says. “My art gets better after working with others. For me, photography is as much about the process as it is the product.”
Simonson admits that the approach often produces quite a bit of tension, but he gladly invites it.
“In my own work, I gravitate toward tension—whether it’s relational, spiritual, emotional. . . . There always exists a struggle,” he says.
Simonson seeks for his work to embody that aspect of life, in both his teaching and his photography.
“You have to stay awake—have your eyes open to the world,” he continues.
Whether through a series that explores the brokenness of his own family or traveling to Uganda to document the lives of AIDS orphans, Simonson desires that his work never “arrive” by way of easy answers.
Rather, it lives and breathes with the rest of the world, very much alive and kicking—for better or for worse. // LOUIE HUESMANN
Marie Parker loves Tori Amos. It’s apparent from the moment you enter her apartment, which is decked with posters and memorabilia. (There’s even a piece of red licorice she snagged after a concert. It’s kept in the “Tori drawer.”)
“It started with just her music and what she was saying,” says Parker. “But then as I got more into her, it became about her. I studied piano for 11 years. [Amos] being a female artist out there, by herself, with more of a younger pop following—right there I was intrigued.”
Having attended more than 15 concerts by Amos—who tours every few years—Parker hopes to collect some more ticket stubs this summer when Amos tours in support of her upcoming album.
Typically, Parker begins saving for prime seats the moment rumors begin circulating about a tour. “It’s like a Tori calendar,” she says. “When she’s not touring, life’s kind of gray. I’m not doing much. Then I start hearing buzz, and it all starts up again!” This year, Parker and her roommate hope to catch Amos when she plays in London.
For Parker, all that time, effort and money is well spent: “I think that when Little Earthquakes came out I was kind of the same age as she was, and I had kind of gone through the same things that she had gone through,” she says. “And as each album comes out, she’s a little bit older and she’s done a little bit more, and I’m a little bit older and I’ve done a little bit more.” // CAITLIN CUTT
“M’m! M’m! Good!” These three words changed Rodney Bardin’s life forever.
Bardin, a Long Beach native, is one of those people everyone seems to know. For those who meet him, it’s difficult to comprehend the many stories he tells about his past. Walk down Second Street with him, though, and you’ll witness all sorts of people reminiscing with Bardin about his days as a radio host, author, director, unofficial Good Year blimp pilot and even Greco-Roman wrestler.
In the early 1980s, Bardin first began his journey in the radio world with an audition for a Campbell’s Soup commercial. “It took me 32 takes to get it right,” Bardin recalls—he didn’t get the job.
Instead, one of the commercial’s producers presented him with an opportunity to host his own radio program, and he began recording in Hollywood at the American Radio Network. Starting in the early ’90s, At a Glance with Rodney Bardin spanned nearly six years and a multitude of guests, including actor and good friend Billy Barty, singing cowboy Roy Rodgers and his wife Dale Evans, and Buddy Ebsen—also known as Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies.
But it was his passion for preserving the history of Long Beach that drove Bardin away from radio and into writing. His first book was about Balboa Films, a movie studio in Long Beach during the early 20th century. “It’s an important part of the history of Long Beach,” says Bardin. “Nobody really knows about it.”
It took Bardin three years to write and many more to research, but Balboa Films: A History and Filmography of the Silent Film Studio was finally released in 1999 and went on to receive numerous awards. Bardin’s work in preserving the richness of Long Beach’s earliest history is an achievement he takes great pride in. He continues to write and plans to release another book soon.
“I’m also a hit-man for the mafia,” he jokes. “Very few people know about it, though.” // LOUIE HUESMANN
In his three years spent greeting customers at the drive-through window at PCH and Second Street, In-N-Out employee Jordan Brown has filled thousands of orders. He could be a cook, he says, but instead he elects to be a friendly face. “I just love making peoples’ day,” Brown explains.
As an elementary school student, Brown was known as the class clown—he remembers his teachers separating him from the rest of the students, a back-of-the-class exile that lasted from second to sixth grade. His favorite thing to talk about with his classmates? Will Smith. Brown liked most everything about Smith, including his style, personality and roles in blockbusters such as Men in Black and Independence Day—and he even borrowed a pick-up line from Smith’s Fresh Prince to use on his crushes.
Today, Brown still possesses a gift for gab, most recently demonstrated with his own student radio talk show at Long Beach City College covering politics, sports and entertainment, with the occasional song or two. Ultimately, he would like to become a TV talk show host. “In the end, I want a show where it seems like we’re just hanging out,” Brown says. “I want the viewers to really get to know me on a personal level, so that I don’t seem like a talk show host, but I’m part of their family.” // NATHAN GREEN
Wed. June 3rd
To first year Long Beach City College student Steven Kong, compassion isn’t merely an aspiration—it’s a calling. “People find a security in me,” he says. “They feel that I am there to just listen and not to judge them.” Kong views this as a gift, the realization of which came early in his life, at age 9, when his mother Reth Oun died of heart failure. “She was the backbone of my family,” he remembers. “It was when my mom died that I realized that this world is a hard place to live [in].”
Growing up in a proud Cambodian family, Kong was raised to remain stoic, keeping his feelings and pain inside. “We never would talk about our mom, which was at times all that I wanted to do—I remember watching cartoons and when the commercials came on, running over to her and giving her a giant hug. I loved her so much,” he says. At the same time his mother passed, the rest of Kong’s world began to change as well. Friends he had grown up with in apartments off Alamitos and 10th Street were frequently heading in and out of jail, forming a negative impression of Long Beach in young Kong’s mind. “It’s depressing, because that kind of lifestyle [drugs and violence] is what many Cambodians resort to in order to survive in the city,” he says.
Today, however, Kong is hopeful for himself and others. His brother, Sopath, is a math teacher at Wilson High School, and one of his close friends recently started a clothing line. Kong himself is contemplating a career in social work, with general aspirations of becoming a positive role model for his community. “I have learned early on that life is precious. We are meant to love and experience family and community on a deeper level than we typically do. I, for one, need my family and friends more than I would have expected.” // SCOTT JONES
Photo by Jason Wilson
Avis Atkins is a senior at CSULB. By summer, she will have graduated in four years, majoring in Human Development with two minors in sociology and psychology. As an honor student, she is the founder/president of Black Scholars, the vice-president of the Rotaract Leadership Club, and a senator of the College of Liberal Arts Associated Students Incorporated. She is hoping to become a college counselor and eventually a college president.
This would be a lot of weight for anyone to carry, but when you understand where she came from, these accomplishments and goals become astounding.
Avis and her four siblings grew up with her father, a Vietnam war veteran who battled an addiction to crack. During her elementary years she regularly begged for money on the street, lived in five cities, attended eleven different schools, lived in a West Hollywood apartment, two motels, two homeless shelters, and a van.
With a smile, she recalls one cold winter night when Reginald VelJohnson (Carl Winslow on Family Matters) gave her $20 and a bucket of chicken.
At the age of seven, she met her mother for the first time (who was by then, a clean crack addict). Her stepfather was physically abusive, an active crack addict, and a thief who would steal money from her and her siblings and get in fistfights with her father. After a lengthy custody court battle, she and her siblings lived with her father in an Atlantic Avenue G.I. house.
Blaming his father for not spending enough time with him, her older brother committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. In his latter days, her father suffered from a deep depression, dabbled in crack, and developed an aggressive cancer that rapidly spread throughout his body. Avis tenderly remembers seeing the bumps under his arms and on his torso.
And then he died alone on his bed at home.
Throughout her entire senior year of high school, Avis lived at home completely alone.
During the last days of her father’s life, she asked him why he treated her so differently than the rest of the kids. She had a deep love and respect for him, but wondered why she always had to do most of the begging and assume so much more responsibility than the others.
With quivering lips and tears streaming down her cheeks, she told me the answer that would change her life forever:
“Because I always knew you could handle it. I see something in you. You got something real special.”
“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” (a Chinese Proverb provided by Avis)
// JASON WILSON
Sue Beeny Photo by Jason Wilson
As a nurse, the first thing Sue Beeney would do at the beginning of her shift was to check the list of patients under her care. Tears would fill her eyes as she saw a line written through a name, because, of course, this meant that that person was dead.
After working in a veteran’s hospital for 1_ years, and continuously feeling the shock and weight that death left behind, she became restless. A vague and unformed question began to surface from the depths of her person until one day, in all its profoundness and simplicity, it faced her directly and unavoidably: What is grief?
In 1986 she enrolled into a self-paced study program about just that. Nine months later, she conducted her first grief support group of eight people in a local church lobby. But it didn’t stop there. People were still dieing and people were still falling into bottomless pits of despair and paralysis. Shell-shocked victims from all over the city began flocking to her intimate therapeutic meetings held in YMCA kitchens, psych hospitals, conference rooms of medical hospitals, and churches. She wrote books on the subject and lived through the doubt and tragedy of others, night after night – for fourteen years as she continued her full-time position as a nurse. In 1999, New Hope Grief Support Community was born. Sue finally quit her daytime job to become the president of her non-profit refuge for the hurt and wounded.
Today, New Hope has 241 volunteers logging in 6000 hours a year, and is running 35 eight-week groups of 8-10 mourners a year. Sue still personally leads as many of these groups as possible; highly trained, caring, and invested volunteers lead the rest. She and her team run weekend camps for children and teens and they even have a pet therapy dog named Cinder who lights up the world for both children and adults. Like Sue and her volunteers, he is a friend that will sit with you through your pain. No gimmicks, no sales pitches, no easy answers. Rather, a friend and comrade with whom you can slowly walk down the long dusty road of grief to a place of healing and a “new normal”.
On average, thirteen people are affected by each death. And each year over 3000 people die in Long Beach. Sue is one of these affected people and she is not holding back her tears, or her smile. Here is a link: http://www.newhopegrief.org //JASON WILSON
Check out the District Weekly:
We want to LOVE this city! Photo by Jeff Gould
So deliberate is the manner of Scott Jones and so demonstrative are his actions that at one point during our conversation—most of which concerns We Love Long Beach (welovelb.com), a secular/nonprofit community advocacy group the 26-year-old Long Beach native formed with his sister, Robin, 30—I jot down “love lobbying” in the corner of my notebook. Which is to say Scott Jones takes love—and all its meanings, forms and implications—very seriously. And he’d like you to, too.
In the time since 50 people showed up to the first neighborhood breakfast on March 31, 2008, We Love Long Beach has become something of a grassroots get-to-know-one-another phenomenon: 500 people attended a bands-and-BBQ bash last summer, featuring such local greats as Deep Sea Diver and the Fling; monthly dinners (at restaurants like Caffe La Strada, On the Mark, Number Nine Noodles and, on Jan. 29, Smooth’s Sports Grille) are regularly attended by upwards of 40 residents; another community breakfast will be held the morning of Feb. 28 at Livingston Park; and there is a BBQ scheduled for May 23 at Marine Stadium Park.
And that’s to say nothing of the offshoot club Scott formed for students at the Jones’s alma mater, Wilson High, where members earn service hours by hosting luncheons for special needs students and, in April, their teachers.
“I’d like to know more people in the city than anyone else,” he says. “It’s one thing to say we’re a diverse city, but it’s another to say we are a city that gets along.”
To that end, the essence of We Love Long Beach lies in its vision statement: “To know and serve the people, neighborhoods and the city of Long Beach.” And the first step toward achieving it, Scott explains, is saying hello to our neighbors—“knowing what they do, where they work.” Which leads to trust: “Every relationship is based on trust—husbands and wives, friends,” he continues. From there, Scott jumps to community, or “working off different gifts and passions,” with the ultimate goal being addressing needs, the kind that are far greater than borrowing a box of sugar. “You go off deeper needs and you become friends,” he concludes.
One could look at Scott and Robin’s efforts and see only idiosyncratic wishes rooted in youthful idealism—or, conversely, note in their accomplishments (delivering four dozen new diners to a restaurant, for example) the potential dangers that come with such influence—namely, power.
But to this Scott offers a sentence, written by Arts of the Wise Leader author Mark Strom: “True humanity is to take people places they haven’t been, so that they might go places I can’t go.”
“The goal for this year is to fine tune and get good at what we can do,” Scott says. “We’d like to be able to do what we do well in every neighborhood.”
Recent Comments