VILLAGE NEWS LA JOLLA
DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME ENDS NOV. 6. Don’t forget to set your clocks back!
LA JOLLA’S PREFERRED SOURCE FOR LOCAL NEWS
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2011
San Diego Community Newspaper Group
Pearl Harbor survivor’s service is never done “[The blast] was so tremendous and it knocked us off our feet, so we dove in the ditch. Then here come the Japanese swooping down so close you could see their faces smiling at us. We were trying to save our lives at that point. It’s amazing we didn’t get hit.” BY MARIKO LAMB | VILLAGE NEWS WWII veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor Al Bodenlos, 91, vividly recalls the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 as if it were this morning. Seventy years ago, a young Bodenlos — fresh out of high school — was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu as a bugle master in charge of 14 musicians in the 804th Engineer Aviation Battalion’s bugle corps. The day before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Bodenlos recalls shopping in Honolulu for bugles for his corps, attend-
Cabrillo Elementary School was removed from the chopping block Tuesday when The San Diego Unified School District scrapped its original plan to close 14 schools across the district to address its budget crisis. In the new proposal presented Tuesday, Barnard Elementary School would be closed and the Mandarin Chinese language-immersion magnet program would be moved out of Point Loma. All other schools in the Point Loma cluster would remain open and operating at their current grade configurations. A final decision on the plan is expected at the Dec. 27 board meeting. To generate an estimated $21 million in revenue, the board also gave staff the go-ahead to explore the sale of the undeveloped portion of
A Family Tradition of Real Estate Success
858-775-2014
DRE#01197544 DRE#01071814
www.SDNEWS.com Volume 17, Number 6
Editor’s note: In honor of Veteran’s Day on Nov. 11, the
Village News will highlight the experiences of a different war veteran each week during the month of November to pay homage to the men and women who have defended our country.
The La Jolla/Riford Library is looking for innovative ways to keep up with new challenges that come with the information age. Courtesy photo
La Jolla Library fights for its future BY MARIKO LAMB | VILLAGE NEWS
Al Bodenlos, now 91, was a bugle master in the 804th Engineer Aviation Battalian’s bugle corps and a survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He is pictured at right when he was 21 and in the center, as a 19-year-old bugler.
ing a hula show at the Royal Hawaiian Inn, then attending a concert at the Army-Navy YMCA. After the concert, Bodenlos chatted with the other musicians and got a bunk at the dormitory for the night. The next morning, all of the soldiers were ordered back on base immediately. Bodenlos thought, “Maneuvers on Sunday? No way.” When he dutifully got onto a shuttle heading back to Schofield, he said to a
friend, “Look at all those airplanes. There must be a hundred of them, and the smoke and the rumble. Boy, the Navy’s putting on realistic maneuvers!” After reaching the harbor, he discovered this was no drill. “The harbor was already a mass of burning oil, ships were blowing up, sailors flying off those ships,” he said. “Although we could see it going on, we SEE VETERAN, Page 3
SDUSD retools closure plan but financial crisis far from over BY PATRICIA WALSH | VILLAGE NEWS
Scott Appleby & Kerry ApplebyPayne
the Barnard school site; the Mission Beach administrative site, located on the beach near Belmont Park; and Bay Terraces 11, an empty lot in the Morse Cluster in Southeast San Diego. Trustee Scott Barnett — who represents the beach-area schools — was the dissenting voice in a 4School supporters line up outside the San Diego Unified 1 vote and said he opposed the sale School District offices before Tuesday night’s board of eduof land because it is “imprudent cation meeting. The trustees retooled parts of their original and gives more ammunition to school closure and consolidation plan and discussed the those who think San Diego Unified growing problem of two credit downgrades in the last week JIM GRANT | Village News is a mismanaged district to down- by credit-rating services. grade its rating.” Over the last week, both Moody’s revenue declines. Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s down“Selling 100-year-old assets for one-time graded San Diego Unified’s credit rating, citing revenues to fund ongoing expenditures is foolthe district’s inability to cut spending to match SEE SCHOOLS, Page 6
Libraries across San Diego constantly have to brace themselves against unforeseen threats like the onslaught of online book retailers and e-books, the city’s on-and-off budget cuts and the fall of national bookstore giants. As public libraries are forced to suffer the brunt of the threats, they must simultaneously get creative with ideas to reinvent themselves in order to stay alive. In the La Jolla Library’s fall newsletter, president of Friends of the La Jolla Library Doug Dawson posed the questions, “What is the future of the public library?” and “What will our La Jolla Library look like in 2016?” In May, the Strategic Planning Committee — a brainchild of Dawson’s — held its first meeting under chairman Bill Boehm and facilitator Michael Teitelman. By its second meeting in September, the committee reported it had begun to answer those very questions. “Action plans are being developed by our committees on finance, library advocacy, strategic planning and board development, volunteers/book sales, marketing, community outreach and membership,” said Boehm. “Enthusiasm for the venture is high, with all board members participating in the plans.” The committee’s first order of business is making the library and its services more visible in the community and increasing its membership. “There are people in La Jolla who don’t even know we have a library in La Jolla. So first of all, we need to get the word out,” said Dawson. “Once we get the word out, the community will be much more aware that we are more than a repository of books.” For non-bookworms, the library hosts a number of other activities including poetry and writing workshops, Ikebana flower design classes, Hatha chair yoga, a chess club, children’s storytime and crafts, weekly film screenings and many other cultural, civic, art and entertainment events. Friends of the La Jolla Library has also recently partnered with Warwick’s to serve as the venue for some of the bookstore’s larger, more popular author speaking events. At just $10 per year, Dawson called library membership “the cheapest deal in town” due to the multitude of resources the library provides. “There is much work that we need to do that goes beyond building just the bricks and mortar,” he said. Friends of the La Jolla Library and the Strategic Planning Committee have set themselves on track toward big goals such as increasing membership 10-fold, keeping the library open 12 hours per day, seven days per week and launching a new, robust, user-friendly website by the start of the new SEE LIBRARY, Page 5