DocentDoings

Researcher gave the Chumash a gift: their heritage John Peabody Harrington relentlessly studied Indian families for decades. Today, a 71-year-old woman who considered him a pest is grateful for his intense scholarship. You can open his video at the end of the newspaper article below (click on the arrow key): Everyone thought the tall, strange white man was some kind of genius. But to teenage Ernestine De Soto he was a giant pain in the neck, a nosy, "Ichabod Crane-like" character who drew her mother's attention from its rightful place -- on her. John Peabody Harrington studied De Soto's Chumash family for nearly 50 years, pumping her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother for the tiniest details of their lives. Everything fascinated him: the Chumash names of places mostly forgotten, of fish no longer caught -- even, to the family's puzzlement, of private parts never discussed in polite company. A brilliant linguist and ...

The following articles appeared in the science section, main part, LA Times on Feb 13 and Jan 20, 2010. Double click on picture to enlarge to read:

In spite of the rain and a restriction on taking interior or even exterior pictures or videos (most but not all docents followed instruction to not to take pictures. The pictures you will see below, with the exception of the docent group pics, were extracted and posted from the internet), today's tour of Mount St. Mary's College and the Doheny Mansion, turned out to be warm and fuzzy. Estelle Doheny permitted Mount St. Mary's College to use Chest Place #2 for classrooms in the late 1950's. After her death in 1958, the Chester Place properties became the downtown campus of Mount St. Mary's. Doheny House at on the Chester Place subdivision in the 1890's, named for the son of developer Charles Silent. Built by Oliver Posey in 1899 and purchased in 1901 for $120,000 by oilman Edward L. Doheny. Over the next 50 years, the Doheny's acquired all of the property in the original Chest Place development plus many other nearby homes. The Doheny's frequently enh...

The curiosity cart basics: Wide hips and narrow hips: With the student as an egg: The big tooth:

Docent President and Host Don and Lenore Motley: Wine tender and server Jim: Wines of the day: Jim, Karen, Don, Ralph and Stephen: Lenore, Rosa Mazon, staff, and Don: Mary and Kim Kessler, staff: Mary and Stephen: Kim and Lenore: Rosa, Onamia, Lenore and Christy: Peter and Don: Lenore, Karen, Maria: Onamia and Susan: Rosa, ____________ and Dolores: Art: Art's delight: More delights: 1975 Docent Quilt: ____, Onamia, Don, Susan and Karen: Susan, Don, Karen and Lenore: Don's Garden Delight: Poi Plant: Video -Don and his desert turtles (click on arrow to play):

October 1, 2009-- In 1994 a research team led by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley; Berhane Asfaw, former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia; and Giday WoldeGabriel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the discovery of the first fossils of a new human ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus. The researchers presented tantalizing evidence that the species was a biped living in woodland conditions more than a million years before the famous "Lucy" fossil of the species Australopithecus afarensis. The research, to be published in an October 2, 2009, special issue of the journal Science, reveals that our earliest ancestors underwent a previously unknown phase of evolution, shedding new light on the nature of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. An artist's reconstruction of the face of Ardipithecus ramidus was made possible by a digital reconstruction of skull parts from two individuals. The face of "Ardi" did not ...

Thanks to the organizing efforts of Rolando and Maria, 23 docents traveled to Chinatown for a presentation and lunch at Homeboy Industries, located down the street, off Alameda and within a couple of blocks south of the Chinatown station on the Gold Line. The meeting began with a story and riveting description by Joseph who grew up in the Aliso Gardens Public Housing Project, was shot twice at the ages of 14 and 15, became involved in gangs even younger, and served time in prison as a result of his heroin use and conviction (he has since gone clean). But it was at Aliso Gardens where Father Gregory Doyle began his lifelong committment to not only gangbangers like Joseph, but in changing the cultural environment of the gang bangers and providing them with a second chance and purpose in life. Joseph said, in his gang time, there were 8 different gangs operating in Aliso Gardents and that over the years, there have been some 800 different gangs formed in the Los Angeles area. He des...