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Santa Monica Daily Press GOING UPSCALE SEE PAGE 6
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THE TAP WATER IS GOOD ISSUE
Altered boulevard remains work in progress BY MELODY HANATANI Daily Press Staff Writer
Brandon Wise brandonw@smdp.com
ROAD WORK: Drivers merge into one lane on Ocean Park Boulevard on Wednesday afternoon. City officials are still studying the impact of reducing the busy boulevard to two lanes instead of four. City staff is working on a report that should be submitted to the City Council soon.
Kennedy lived well to the very end MARILYNN MARCHIONE AP Medical Writer
He lived 15 months with an incurable brain tumor, a little longer than usual for a patient in his late 70s. Perhaps equally important is that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy lived those months well — able to work almost to the end, to sail the choppy New England waters he adored, to help elect a president he supported, even giving him a dog. Time is important to any cancer patient. Quality of life, not just how much life they can squeeze out, is increasingly the focus for people with a terminal illness, cancer specialists say. It also is one of the chief goals of treatments for brain tumors, since these therapies typically do not buy much time.
“The advances that we’ve made in prolonging survival aren’t as big as we’ve liked them to be, but people have stayed at a good quality of life right up to the end,” said Dr. Matthew Ewend, neurosurgery chief at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Even after treatments can no longer control tumor growth for patients, “we can usually keep their quality of life pretty good with medicines for brain swelling, and then the end is usually pretty graceful,” Ewend said. There is much to be admired in how Kennedy spent his final months, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “This is a man who had a serious and
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A moment to remember with Uncle Teddy and his beloved sister Eunie BY BOBBY SHRIVER Special to the Daily Press
In mid-June Uncle Teddy came to my mother’s Hyannis Port home for a drink before dinner. My family and I had just arrived from Santa Monica. Even though we were tired, Teddy and his wife Vicki wanted to welcome us to town. So a little cocktail party was planned.
SUNSET PARK Lloyd Saunders remembers when Ocean Park Boulevard was his go-to route, driving on the neighborhood’s main drag daily to reach any points east and west. Today, the 30-year Santa Monica resident avoids it at all costs,opting for other streets because of “bottleneck traffic” that he blames on the current configuration, which city officials changed from four lanes to two in December 2007. “It’s hard to get onto Ocean Park because there’s just a stream of cars,” he said. “It’s the sign of the times, there’s so many darn people here (in the city) now.” Responding to concerns over safety on a 12-block stretch of Ocean Park Boulevard after several pedestrians were struck over the past few years, City Hall launched a pilot project in which they condensed the busy corridor from Lincoln to Cloverfield boulevards from two lanes in each direction to one, hoping to calm the speed of traffic and eliminate some of the dangers posed in the previous configuration. Nearly two years and several community workshops later, the project is still in its pilot phase, partly the result of an understaffed Transportation Management Division that lost two planners whose positions have yet to be filled. “We’ve just had to focus on responding to the regulatory things and working on the Land Use and Circulation Element and responding to problems as best as we can,” Lucy Dyke, the transportation planning manager, said. “But we have not been able to circle back and close the loop with the City
SEE SHRIVER PAGE 11 SEE KENNEDY PAGE 10
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