| SHELDON K. FRIEDLANDER 1927 - 2007 |
Sheldon K. Friedlander, 79, developed a way to find
sources of smog particles
Los Angeles Times by Valerie J. Nelson Times Staff Writer
sources of smog particles
Los Angeles Times by Valerie J. Nelson Times Staff Writer
Dorothy Green, a leading environmental activist whose anger over the pollution of Santa Monica Bay spurred her to
establish the grass-roots group Heal the Bay and head efforts to change water policy in California, died Monday at her
Westwood home. She was 79. The cause was melanoma, according to her son, Joshua.
Green became a warrior for clean water in 1985 after hearing how her brother had been splattered with barely
treated sewage from an open drain at Ballona Creek in Marina del Rey. The creek runs into Santa Monica Bay, which
encompasses a large swath of the Southern California coast, from Point Dume south to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
Soon after the incident, Green huddled in her living room with a group of like-minded activists and formed Heal the
Bay, which became a leader in the fight to clean up and protect local coastal waters. One of the largest nonprofit
environmental groups in Log Angeles with 15,000 members, it is known for its annual Beach Report Card on water
quality at California beaches.
When Green launched Heal the Bay, the challenges were significant.
"We had a 'dead zone' in the middle of Santa Monica Bay, we had bottom fish with tumors and 10-million-gallon
sewage spills in the middle of a bright summer day. None of that occurs anymore," said Mark Gold, a marine biologist
and Heal the Bay's executive director, who has been with the group almost from its inception. "That's Dorothy's legacy
you see every time you look out at the bay."
Other Groups
Heal the Bay, of which Green was founding president, was only one of the products of her vision. She also founded
the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, a nonprofit group dedicated to restoring and preserving
the watershed, and California Water Impact Network, which is focused on the equitable use of public water.
She was a mentor to many of the current leaders on water issues in the state, including Timothy F. Brick, chairman
of the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and a longtime water activist.
"She was quite unique in our generation," said Brick, who knew Green for 35 years. "She not only was personally a
very effective advocate but she founded a series of organizations that have been very effective in shaping policy on a
variety of different water issues."
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, in a statement Monday, called her "a giant of the environmental movement."
Green, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was born in Detroit on March 16, 1929. She graduated from UC Berkeley
with a degree in music in 1951, the same year she married her husband, Jacob. He joined her family's construction
business and from 1955 to 1960 the couple worked together in Desert Hot Springs building and later operating a
motel and water system.
She took her first step toward activism in 1962, when she joined the Exceptional Children's Foundation to help
people like her son, Hershel, who is mentally challenged. For the next 17 years she ran the organization's Christmas
card program, which raised $25,000 a year. With another son facing the draft, she also became involved in the
antiwar movement.
By the early 1970s she was a full-fledged citizen warrior. She campaigned for Proposition 20, which led to the
creation of the California Coastal Commission. Later, she joined the fight against a proposal to build a peripheral
canal, which would bring Northern California waters south through the California Aqueduct by looping around the
polluted Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The campaign got her "hooked on water" issues, according to Gold.
By 1985 she was a coordinator of Working Alliance to Equalize Rates, a group concerned with statewide water
issues. She also was president of the Los Angeles chapter of the League of Conservation voters, a politically oriented
environmental group.
When the phone call came from her brother about his troubling discovery in Ballona Creek, she was, she recalled in
an interview with Surfline magazine, "between issues." She sprang into action, starting with a personal inspection of
the spot in the creek where largely untreated waste was spilling out next to a popular bike trail.
"The stench was undeniable", Green recalled in a 1987 interview with The Times.
Due to the efforts of Green and a small group of other activists a political stink ensued.
Green called a number of leading environmentalists, including then-Assemblyman Tom Hayden, who represented
the Westside. With Green leading the charge, they exposed problems in the city of Los Angeles' decaying sewer
system, applying public pressure that generated critical attention.
The city was fined $180,000 by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Board for several spills that had dumped
nearly 200,000 gallons of waste into the ocean. The next year, 1986, the city agreed to introduce secondary treatment
of sewage at its Hyperion plant in El Segundo, a first step in a years-long process of detoxifying the bay.
The group soon began to hear reports of what many people believed to be the health consequences of swimming in
polluted waters.
"We started getting calls from surfers with infected ears and rashes," Green said. "We found out the lifeguards had
an inordinate history of cancer and health problems, but the county didn't recognize the links between water quality
and these illnesses."
1987 Victory
When Green's group formally organized as a nonprofit, it chose the name Heal the Bay because "it communicates
hope," Green said. "That's the main thing we wanted to sell."
It held beach rallies to sign up members and generate publicity and offered testimony at hearings before regulatory
boards. At the center was Green, who colleagues said had a gift for communicating with everyone from sewage
treatment engineers to volunteers assigned to pick up beach litter.
"You could not say no to Dorothy," said Paula Daniels, a Los Angeles Board of Public Works commissioner who gave
up a law career to join Green's water battles.
By 1987, Heal the Bay counted 900 individuals and 60 organizations as members. They celebrated a major victory
that year when a federal judge approved a settlement between the city and the federal Environmental Protection
Agency after Los Angeles agreed to cease dumping sewage sludge into the bay and to upgrade the Hyperion facility.
Heal the Bay was granted friend-of-the-court status in the EPA lawsuit and assigned the role of monitoring the city's
progress. By 1989, the Hyperion plant was nine years ahead of schedule in meeting an important federal pollution
standard. in 1992, she participated in the opening of a new sewer line tat would help end the dumping of sewage into
the bay. Green served seven years as president of Heal the Bay. In 1990 then-Mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to a
term on the Board of Water and Power. She remained a member of Heal the Bay's board.
The venerable activist was first diagnosed with melanoma 30 years ago. In 2003, the cancer reappeared and spread
to her brain and eventually to other organs but Green refused to let her illness interfere with the issues that remained
at the top of her agenda.
In 2005 she spoke passionately at Heal the Bay's 20th anniversary gala on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier -
11 days after undergoing a major operation. Earlier this year, she showed up at a board meeting a week after having
her spleen and kidney removed.
Two weeks ago, while bedridden and in hospice care, she wrote an eloquent plea for sensible water policy, which
was published on The Times' opinion page last Wednesday.
"Until her last breath," Gold said, "she was going to try and make this a better place."
In addition to Joshua, of Brentwood, and Hershel, of Diamond Bar, she is survived by her son Avrom, of Phoenix;
brothers Morris Cohen of Los Angeles and Gerald Cohen of Westwood; and three grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday at Mount Sinai Hollywood Hills, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los
Angeles, 90068. Memorial donations may be sent to California Water Impact Network, the Los Angeles and San
Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, and Heal the Bay.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
establish the grass-roots group Heal the Bay and head efforts to change water policy in California, died Monday at her
Westwood home. She was 79. The cause was melanoma, according to her son, Joshua.
Green became a warrior for clean water in 1985 after hearing how her brother had been splattered with barely
treated sewage from an open drain at Ballona Creek in Marina del Rey. The creek runs into Santa Monica Bay, which
encompasses a large swath of the Southern California coast, from Point Dume south to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
Soon after the incident, Green huddled in her living room with a group of like-minded activists and formed Heal the
Bay, which became a leader in the fight to clean up and protect local coastal waters. One of the largest nonprofit
environmental groups in Log Angeles with 15,000 members, it is known for its annual Beach Report Card on water
quality at California beaches.
When Green launched Heal the Bay, the challenges were significant.
"We had a 'dead zone' in the middle of Santa Monica Bay, we had bottom fish with tumors and 10-million-gallon
sewage spills in the middle of a bright summer day. None of that occurs anymore," said Mark Gold, a marine biologist
and Heal the Bay's executive director, who has been with the group almost from its inception. "That's Dorothy's legacy
you see every time you look out at the bay."
Other Groups
Heal the Bay, of which Green was founding president, was only one of the products of her vision. She also founded
the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, a nonprofit group dedicated to restoring and preserving
the watershed, and California Water Impact Network, which is focused on the equitable use of public water.
She was a mentor to many of the current leaders on water issues in the state, including Timothy F. Brick, chairman
of the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and a longtime water activist.
"She was quite unique in our generation," said Brick, who knew Green for 35 years. "She not only was personally a
very effective advocate but she founded a series of organizations that have been very effective in shaping policy on a
variety of different water issues."
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, in a statement Monday, called her "a giant of the environmental movement."
Green, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was born in Detroit on March 16, 1929. She graduated from UC Berkeley
with a degree in music in 1951, the same year she married her husband, Jacob. He joined her family's construction
business and from 1955 to 1960 the couple worked together in Desert Hot Springs building and later operating a
motel and water system.
She took her first step toward activism in 1962, when she joined the Exceptional Children's Foundation to help
people like her son, Hershel, who is mentally challenged. For the next 17 years she ran the organization's Christmas
card program, which raised $25,000 a year. With another son facing the draft, she also became involved in the
antiwar movement.
By the early 1970s she was a full-fledged citizen warrior. She campaigned for Proposition 20, which led to the
creation of the California Coastal Commission. Later, she joined the fight against a proposal to build a peripheral
canal, which would bring Northern California waters south through the California Aqueduct by looping around the
polluted Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The campaign got her "hooked on water" issues, according to Gold.
By 1985 she was a coordinator of Working Alliance to Equalize Rates, a group concerned with statewide water
issues. She also was president of the Los Angeles chapter of the League of Conservation voters, a politically oriented
environmental group.
When the phone call came from her brother about his troubling discovery in Ballona Creek, she was, she recalled in
an interview with Surfline magazine, "between issues." She sprang into action, starting with a personal inspection of
the spot in the creek where largely untreated waste was spilling out next to a popular bike trail.
"The stench was undeniable", Green recalled in a 1987 interview with The Times.
Due to the efforts of Green and a small group of other activists a political stink ensued.
Green called a number of leading environmentalists, including then-Assemblyman Tom Hayden, who represented
the Westside. With Green leading the charge, they exposed problems in the city of Los Angeles' decaying sewer
system, applying public pressure that generated critical attention.
The city was fined $180,000 by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Board for several spills that had dumped
nearly 200,000 gallons of waste into the ocean. The next year, 1986, the city agreed to introduce secondary treatment
of sewage at its Hyperion plant in El Segundo, a first step in a years-long process of detoxifying the bay.
The group soon began to hear reports of what many people believed to be the health consequences of swimming in
polluted waters.
"We started getting calls from surfers with infected ears and rashes," Green said. "We found out the lifeguards had
an inordinate history of cancer and health problems, but the county didn't recognize the links between water quality
and these illnesses."
1987 Victory
When Green's group formally organized as a nonprofit, it chose the name Heal the Bay because "it communicates
hope," Green said. "That's the main thing we wanted to sell."
It held beach rallies to sign up members and generate publicity and offered testimony at hearings before regulatory
boards. At the center was Green, who colleagues said had a gift for communicating with everyone from sewage
treatment engineers to volunteers assigned to pick up beach litter.
"You could not say no to Dorothy," said Paula Daniels, a Los Angeles Board of Public Works commissioner who gave
up a law career to join Green's water battles.
By 1987, Heal the Bay counted 900 individuals and 60 organizations as members. They celebrated a major victory
that year when a federal judge approved a settlement between the city and the federal Environmental Protection
Agency after Los Angeles agreed to cease dumping sewage sludge into the bay and to upgrade the Hyperion facility.
Heal the Bay was granted friend-of-the-court status in the EPA lawsuit and assigned the role of monitoring the city's
progress. By 1989, the Hyperion plant was nine years ahead of schedule in meeting an important federal pollution
standard. in 1992, she participated in the opening of a new sewer line tat would help end the dumping of sewage into
the bay. Green served seven years as president of Heal the Bay. In 1990 then-Mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to a
term on the Board of Water and Power. She remained a member of Heal the Bay's board.
The venerable activist was first diagnosed with melanoma 30 years ago. In 2003, the cancer reappeared and spread
to her brain and eventually to other organs but Green refused to let her illness interfere with the issues that remained
at the top of her agenda.
In 2005 she spoke passionately at Heal the Bay's 20th anniversary gala on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier -
11 days after undergoing a major operation. Earlier this year, she showed up at a board meeting a week after having
her spleen and kidney removed.
Two weeks ago, while bedridden and in hospice care, she wrote an eloquent plea for sensible water policy, which
was published on The Times' opinion page last Wednesday.
"Until her last breath," Gold said, "she was going to try and make this a better place."
In addition to Joshua, of Brentwood, and Hershel, of Diamond Bar, she is survived by her son Avrom, of Phoenix;
brothers Morris Cohen of Los Angeles and Gerald Cohen of Westwood; and three grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday at Mount Sinai Hollywood Hills, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los
Angeles, 90068. Memorial donations may be sent to California Water Impact Network, the Los Angeles and San
Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, and Heal the Bay.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
D O R O T H Y G R E E N
L e a d i n g E n v i r o n m e n t a l i s t
1 9 2 9 -- 2 0 0 8
By: Elaine Woo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 14, 2008
L e a d i n g E n v i r o n m e n t a l i s t
1 9 2 9 -- 2 0 0 8
By: Elaine Woo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 14, 2008
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Studio City, California 91614-0084
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Studio City, California 91614-0084
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| Sheldon K. Friedlander, a pioneering researcher who developed a method to identify the sources of Particles in smog in the Los Angeles Basin, a break through that led to greater understanding and regulation of air pollution, has died. He was 79. Friedlander, who was a UCLA chemical engineering professor, died of complications from pulmonary fibrosis February 9, 2007, at his Pacific Palisades home, his family said. While at Caltech in the 1970's he devised a way to analyze existing data that measured the chemical makeup of smog particles. By doing so, he was able to unravel who -- or what -- was contributing to air pollution at any given time. "He developed a picture of what was in the smog that was far more detailed than anyone had put together before," Rick Flagan, chairman of Caltech's chemical engineering departmant, told The Times this week. For instance, Friedlander was able to link lead particles to gasoline usage and zinc traces to the rubber in tires. The method he established has been used extensively to regulate air quality around the world, and a more sophisticated version is still used today, Flagan said. Friedlander was considered one of the fathers of aerosol science, the study of particles in the air and gases, and helped establish it as an independent discipline, colleagues said. "Sheldon was always one with deep insights and a quick grasp of interesting phenomena," Flagan said. "He had a profound effect on the field." After joining UCLA in 1983, Friedlander founded the school's Air Quality and Aerosol Technology Laboratory and became its director. In the mid-1980's, the lab's pollution detectives were searching for easier and cheaper ways to trap smokestack emissions. "We must find ways to control toxic wastes before they are produced rather than ways of disposing of them afterward," Friedlander told the teen magazine Scholastic update in 1985. In 1987 at UCLA, he established the nation's first engineering research center devoted entirely to solving the problem of hazardous waste management and served as its director for several years. Later in his career, Friedlander turned his attention toward synthesizing new materials by using aerosol chemical processes. His experiments with nanoparticles helped further understanding of how the microminiature units could form chains with elastic properties. Nanoscale materials could help make an unforgiving material such as ceramic stronger and easier to manufacture, Flagan said. From 1982 to 1998, Friedlander headed the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Commitee, which provides independent advice to the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1982, he helped found the American Assn. for Aerosol research, which established the Friedlander Award in 1997. It recognizes an outstanding dissertation by a doctoral student in the field of Aerosol studies. Sheldon Kay Friedlander was born November 17, 1927, in New York City, the only child of Irving Friedlander, a paper box manufacturer, and his milliner wife, Rose. His middle name stood for his mother's original last name, Katzowitz. He interrupted his studies at Columbia University to serve in the Army just after World War II, but returned to earn a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. He followed it with a master's from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. At the Harvard School of Public Health, Friedlander was captivated by the study of aerosols while working on an Atomic Energy Commission project about the control of radioactive aerosols. He earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1954 and became a professor at John Hopkins University. A decade later, he arrived at Caltech and conducted air pollution experiments using huge Teflon balloons launched from a rooftop lab. On a blind date arranged by relatives, Friedlander met his wife, Marjorie Robbins, and married her eight weeks later in 1958. A Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim fellow, he delighted in fishing in the Angeles National Forest and watching the television show "Get Smart". His children remembered their father as a great dancer who refused to go to Disneyland, which he viewed as a vacation destination - and he vacationed only in places he was invited to lecture. They said he watched television at dinner only once, during the Lakers' NBA- record 33-game winning streak in the 1971-72 season. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four children, Eva, Zoe and Josiah Friedlander and Amelie Yehros; and eight grandchildren. -valerie.nelson@latimes.com |