Giant Mural a Belated Monument to the Games

When the 1984 Olympics came and went without seeing to creation of the giant mural David Botello, Wayne Healy and George Yepes had been planning since four years before the Games, the three men were discouraged but not beaten. Though they say now they feel they were given an unnecessary runaround by the sponsors of the Games, they weren’t dissuaded from seeing the project through.

So, today, the mural is finally in the painting stage, 85 feet high and just as wide, on the north wall of the Victor Clothing Co. building, on Broadway at 3rd Street in downtown Los Angeles. It would have been a striking creation for the Olympics. It will be equally striking, apparently, when it is completed sometime toward the end of this year.

For Botello, Healy and Yepes, who are partners in a mural studio called East Los Streetscapers, the situation represents at least a moral victory. They’d like to have had the mural ready for Olympic visitors, but it will brighten the days of downtown shoppers for years to come and Yepes figures that isn’t a bad result.

The mural, said Botello, will have an athletic theme and include a number of Olympic athletes performing their various feats. “We would like to just show visually the glory of the human body and what people can achieve,” said Botello. Rich with symbolism, the mural will also depict historic roots of athletic competition and at least one of the figures in the painting, an Aztec, said Botello, will be nude--side view.

(It is only the most recent foray into murals for Victor Clothing. In fact, the Streetscapers’ project is the fourth large mural to adorn the building. A second of the four is also still in the painting stage. It depicts actor Anthony Quinn in a pose the artist, Eloy Torres, has titled “The Pope of Broadway.” The work is on one of the south walls of the building, visible from the intersection of 3rd and Broadway.)

“We are going to become the unofficial muralists of the Olympics,” vowed Botello. “We’re going to have the biggest monument of all.”

Dog’s Life and Language

The way Sue Myles sees it, canine-human relations could be measurably improved if only people would learn to think like dogs. It’s a gospel Myles preaches at Companion Dogs by Sue Myles, her dog-training school in Newport Beach, and at classes she gives at the Cal State L.A. extension program.

How, she was asked, does a dog think? “Well,” she said, “a good example is someone approaching a dog that is lying down and chewing on a toy or a bone. The owner strolls over, bends down over the dog to pat him on the head and the dog bites. If the owner was thinking like a dog, he would not have done that. But because he was thinking like a human, the bite happened.”

If the owner had been thinking like a dog, Myles said, he would have realized that “from the dog’s point of view, the bite was a very normal and predictive behavior. The dog interpreted the owner’s behavior as, ‘Someone is coming over and trying to challenge and dominate me. I need to drive this person away because I want to continue chewing on my bone.’ ” In other words, the owner would simply have left well enough alone. “When one is trying to communicate with a dog, you are automatically using a different language,” said Myles. “The dog will never learn English, so we have to learn dog.”

Contributing to this fundamental difficulty in communication, Myles said, are physiological differences between the species of which many humans are not sufficiently aware. “A dog’s world view is probably a lot cheerier than the average Democrat’s,” she said, “but very different. Dogs are nearsighted and almost color blind. They do not see stationary objects well and they do not see well if the dog is standing still. But if you put the object the dog is watching or the dog in motion, the dog’s visual acuity is increased.

“That translates into a dog reacting to very subtle body postures and facial gestures. And when a dog responds to some of these, the owner is often mystified.”

Art and South Africa

When Mary Jane Hewitt heard a few months ago that a group called Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid was planning a black-tie dinner March 24 to raise funds to work against racial oppression in South Africa, she thought she had just the thing to lend an appropriate note of artistic urgency to the event.

Hewitt is co-director of the Museum of African American Art, which is quartered in the May Co. department store building in the Crenshaw area. Slowly, she said, the museum has been building a collection of art pieces by native South African artists that reflect the agonizing reality of life in that country.

The works are procured in South Africa and shipped to Los Angeles, but Hewitt is vague about the details--particularly the identity of the museum’s supplier in South Africa--for fear of shutting off the source. But on the evening of March 24, Hewitt will mount a special exhibit for people attending the dinner that includes such items as sculptures of black South Africans, complete with passbooks--the mandatory internal passports that are a tool of oppression by the minority white government--barbed wire and fences.

“They make a strong statement about the condition of blacks in South Africa,” Hewitt said. The exhibit, which may be shown to the public sometime later this year or in 1986, also includes several paintings that portray “family life and family love and anguish.”

Toys of Medicinal Value

In 22 years as a health educator, it had always bothered Pat Azarnoff that there aren’t more educational materials and health-related toys available to make it easier for doctors, nurses and other health workers to communicate with children. So, in 1981, Azarnoff decided to do something about it, forming Pediatric Projects Inc., which tries to fill the gap.

Among the items Azarnoff has assembled is a doll called Sugar Babe, a creation with soft rubber skin and markings at the anatomical sites where insulin injections should be given. A small child with diabetes can use the doll to learn how to self-administer insulin. First, there is practice with injections of water into Sugar Babe--the doll has a little valve so it can be emptied periodically--and, eventually, having learned what’s involved by practicing on Sugar Babe, Azarnoff says, even children as young as 3 can learn to take care of their own insulin needs.

“If they’re diabetic,” she said, “they’re going to have to learn to take care of themselves sooner or later.” When the training is over, Azarnoff quickly added, Sugar Babe can be snuggled up close, just like any doll.

Other items in the Pediatric Projects arsenal include a stuffed monkey that sits in a wheelchair, a koala that wears glasses and a frog with a cast on his leg. Parents and health workers who want to explore what may be available to help young patients through the emotional trauma of dealing with major illness or injury can call Pediatric Projects at 828-8963, or write to the organization at Box 1880, Santa Monica, Calif. 90406.