Odds & Ends Around the Valley

Very Topical Teen-Agers

Eighth grade isn’t what it used to be. Back then, would you have considered writing a report on “Contraceptive Technology and Its Effect on American Society”? Or building a V-8 engine for a project you titled “The Age of the Internal Combustion Engine”?

Two students from Lindero Canyon Middle School in Agoura competed last week at the University of Maryland on the national level for “History Day” awards with these projects, after winning at the county and state levels. The theme for this year’s competition was “The Effects of Science and Technology on History.”

Amy Sechooler, 14, of Agoura Hills tackled the topic of engines and placed in the top 15 nationally.

“I was thinking about the theme and I read an editorial in the New York Times by Russell Baker. He talked about how people of the 1920s knew how to fix the internal combustion engine,” she said. “So I did a little research and found out all the things it affected.”

She built a large display, its centerpiece being a model V-8 engine that she assembled herself.

Tenaya Rodewald, 14, also of Agoura Hills, wrote the 2,500-word paper on birth control and placed sixth nationwide. “I wanted to do something with women and their role in society, and contraceptive technology was the only technology I could come up with that would have affected their role,” she said.

The school’s social science chairman, Patrick Hill, is proud of the two students. “Our school has participated for over four years in this competition, and every year we’ve improved. But this year we hit the jackpot!” he said. “They deserve it.”

Woodland Hills or Brazil?

Not every corporate headquarters has a rain forest in its building. Sebastian International, a hair-care products company based in Woodland Hills, will soon have three rain-forest “installations” in its new building on De Soto Avenue.

The company has launched an extensive educational campaign to help save the rain forests. This is not a cause-marketing gimmick, they say.

“My brother was a Peace Corps director in Brazil in the late ‘60s, and he brought home terrible stories about areas being devastated by mining,” said John Sebastian, president of the company he formed in 1976. “But at the time, we couldn’t find too many people interested in doing anything about it.”

Now rain-forest devastation has the public’s attention. Sebastian saw the potential his company had for influencing the public. “We have 10,000 salons each with an average client base of 300 people a week,” he said. “There are millions of people captive in those chairs. We’re trying to convince hairdressers that they’re doing more than cutting hair--they can establish knowledge.”

The company spreads the word through brochures and paper bags with messages printed on them (example: an explanation of the greenhouse effect on the Earth), and holds fund-raisers for the Rainforest Foundation. For every product purchased, the company donates 25 cents to the foundation. The company has contributed $150,000 so far this year to the foundation.

That wasn’t enough for John Sebastian. He decided that his company had to “clean its own house first.” Two of the most popular products--Hi-Energy Hold and Hair Gloss--were dropped because they were aerosols and couldn’t be reformulated. And the company’s new building incorporates a wide array of energy-conservation features.

“We wanted to do more than give money,” Sebastian said.

Glass Grows Up

When homeowner Elly Hart undertook a major remodeling of her Sherman Oaks house, she added 11 skylights. “They open up a whole new vista. You can see the treetops around here, and you don’t see the smog like you do when you look out a regular window,” she said.

Architects and contractors alike used to be wary of skylights. “The old problems of too much heat and too much sunlight have been eliminated,” said Bob Ahl, president of U. S. Skylights in Woodland Hills. “The industry has matured to a point where problems with leaks and cracks have all been addressed.”

Technological innovations have made the glass much more energy-efficient.

Today’s skylights take on a variety of architectural shapes, in contrast to the milky domes that used to be popular. One of the most requested shapes is the pyramid. While most of Ahl’s customers prefer a traditional pyramid, many now want an octagonal shape.

“You’re seeing more and more usage of glass in buildings, and that’s a trend that’s here to stay,” Ahl said. “People love to have light. It’s a very important part of our environment, especially in Southern California.”

A Hospital Room With a View

“It’s those anonymous, ordinary people who’ve done good things throughout their lives--that’s what makes the world work. It’s when people leave a place a little better than they found it,” said Dr. Hamlin Emory, a psychiatrist who runs the medical stress unit at Westlake Hospital in Westlake Village.

This is a lesson that Emory learned by his parents’ example, and recently he took that lesson to heart when he was briefly hospitalized at the place where he works and noticed that the garden outside his room had been rather neglected.

“I thought to myself, ‘Let’s get this place cleaned up.’ You don’t complain to someone about it. You do it,” he said.

So he called his good friend Bob Bergquist, owner of Green Arrow Nurseries in the San Fernando Valley and asked him to come over ASAP with a gardener. “Within a day, we had it cleaned up,” Emory said. “Then Mr. Bergquist said, ‘This is on me’ and I told him no, because I had called him up, but he insisted. So I was just the idea guy.”

Their generous efforts are being enjoyed by other patients. “It was always a nice topic of conversation when people came to visit me: ‘Look at my lovely garden,’ ” said Richard Kort of Agoura, who was hospitalized at Westlake a few weeks ago for pneumonia and was assigned to one of the rooms next to the garden.

Overheard

“It seems in L. A. the posted speed limit tells you the slowest you can go, rather than the fastest.” --Tourist in the lobby of the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills