Barry-Wehmiller has a funny way of valuing its employees

You'd be hard pressed to find a company that talks more about its "people-centric" management culture than Barry-Wehmiller, a privately owned manufacturer of industrial equipment.

Barry-Wehmiller, which has $1.5 billion in annual sales, says it's all about fostering "personal growth" among its 7,000 employees, whom it calls "team members." Its "Guiding Principles of Leadership" include the imperative to "treat people superbly and compensate them fairly." (Italics are theirs.)

The chief yogi of this philosophy is Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Chapman, who gives talks about the "crisis of leadership" in corporate America, lamenting that "over 130 million people in our workforce go home every day feeling they work for a company that doesn't care about them." With a catch in his throat and possibly a tear in his eye, he told one audience in May about the "awesome responsibility" he shoulders for "the lives that are influenced by my leadership."

Hey, Bob? Tell it to the 111 steelworkers you're laying off in Southern California so you can transfer their jobs to a lower-paid workforce in Ohio (with the help of a "job creating" tax break from the latter state).

These workers — excuse me, "team members" — are employed by Barry-Wehmiller's Pneumatic Scale Angelus plant in Vernon. When they reported to work Nov. 2, they were handed a five-paragraph statement advising them that the company had decided to shut the plant by Jan. 1. Only a few weeks earlier, the company had staged a ceremony at the plant in recognition of its record sales.

The notice said the workers would be paid through the end of the year, but to avoid "personal injury to you or harm to equipment or products ... because of this distraction," they should go home and stay home. In the meantime, the company would negotiate the "tentative closing decision" with their representatives from the United Steel Workers union. USW officials have told me it's clear that the decision is anything but tentative.

The 60-day notice, which is required by state law whenever a big layoff is in the offing, was signed by the company's director of "people and culture development." "That notice was the first anyone heard of their plans," says Douglas Marshall, 71, who retired last year after 23 years as a machinist at Angelus.

You may never have heard of Angelus, so here's some background on what used to be one of California's most community-oriented businesses.

Founded by Henry L. Guenther in 1910 as the Angelus Sanitary Can Machine Co., the firm produced "can seamers." These machines fuse the lids of metal cans to their bodies. Angelus' models, which were the gold standard in the packaging industry, can be found in bottling plants all over the world. Hoist a can of Coke or a cold beer, and the chances are roughly 4 in 5 that it was produced on an Angelus machine.

"They were the Rolls-Royce of machines," says Gil Salazar, who spent 43 years in the industry — the last five as a field representative for Angelus — before retiring this month. "The Angelus people were craftsmen, which is something the United States doesn't have anymore."

After Guenther and his wife, Pearl, died in the 1950s, control of Angelus passed to a nonprofit foundation she had established. Its profits every year went into the Henry L. Guenther Foundation's coffers and out to dozens of worthy Los Angeles charities, chiefly health and medical institutions.

In 2007, pressured by the IRS to comply with rules forbidding ownership of a profit-making company by a nonprofit, the foundation sold Angelus to Barry-Wehmiller for $84 million, according to a foundation tax filing. Since then, the foundation has had no involvement with Angelus. But it has continued to make millions of dollars in donations every year: The Salk Institute, St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, Mercy Hospital in San Diego and the Braille Institute in Los Angeles all ranked among its top beneficiaries in 2011.

Barry-Wehmiller, for its part, promptly applied its "people-centric" policies at Angelus, former employees told me. Non-union managers got their holidays pared back, their pensions frozen and their healthcare premiums jacked up.

"They let us know that was what they were looking to do with the union workers too," recalls Chuck Johnson, a USW shop steward at the plant for more than 20 years. A layoff hit 33 members of the Angelus local last year. Chapman made occasional appearances at the plant but never spoke with the unionized employees, Johnson says.

I called Chapman at Barry-Wehmiller's headquarters in suburban St. Louis so he could help me reconcile his words and his actions. But neither he nor anyone else from the firm called me back, apparently content to let his logorrhea do the talking.

And talk he does. His appearance in May at an Illinois event affiliated with the TED organization seemed to be typical. (TED is a lecture series allowing self-styled visionaries and CEO types to put their personal awesomeness on display, but the results can be hit-or-miss.) Chapman's TED talk was vaguely spiritual, filled with the buzz of sincerity and the buzzwords of self-actualization — "We've been paying people for their hands for years, and they would have given us their heads and their hearts for free if we had just known how to ask them and say, 'Thank you for sharing.'" Etc., etc.

There do seem to be Barry-Wehmiller locations where its Guiding Principals of Leadership hold sway. A USW analysis called the firm "paternalistic" and acknowledged it treats employees with "a lot of respect and kindness." A United Auto Workers representative in Green Bay, Wis., told me the 330 UAW workers at the firm's large printing-equipment plant there enjoy excellent relations with management, not least because in taking over the plant, Barry-Wehmiller kept it from folding.

"As a workplace, we should be envied," UAW local President Pat Vesser said.

That hasn't been the experience at Angelus. When the foundation sold the factory it had a healthy order backlog and plenty of overtime. But soon after the 2007 takeover, the employees in Los Angeles, where the average hourly wage was about $25, saw that their work was being shifted to a non-union plant in Ohio, where the wage was $16 to $18, according to the USW.

The company even cadged a five-year, $760,000 tax credit from a state development fund in Ohio for promising to add 75 jobs there — a hint of how a smart company may be playing the job-creation game for profit while actually cutting employment.

The average age of the Angelus workforce is 54, and the average worker has been there for decades. But there's no sign that any economic development agencies in California, Los Angeles County or Vernon stepped up to try to save the more than 100 jobs at stake. Could they have helped? Who knows. The Angelus workers say Vernon owns the lease on the factory, but there doesn't seem to have been an effort by the city to cut the rent.

Barry-Wehmiller has firmly turned away USW proposals to keep the Vernon plant running, says Steve Bjornbak, 56, a 38-year veteran of Angelus and the USW local's president. He suspects the company plans to revive limited operations with lower-wage employees in California later, "after they've dissolved the union." There will be talks after the first of the year over severance, healthcare and retirement benefits for the laid-off workforce.

No one disputes that Barry-Wehmiller is perfectly within its rights to find the cheapest way to manufacture whatever it wishes, wherever it wishes. But its actions at Angelus don't exactly measure up to Bob Chapman's saccharine prattle about running one of those organizations that "truly care about the impact they make on the lives of the people that join them."

"This is all about people's lives," Chapman told his TED audience. Right you are, Bob.

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

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Wireless companies look to church towers for cell sites

To expand service, cellular phone companies are turning to a higher power.

They're not increasing the wattage of their transmitters. They're looking for churches near residential areas willing to let them hide cell sites in steeples, belfries and crosses.

Wireless companies are hunting for new sites as they scramble to close gaps in phone reception and expand their networks to meet the explosion of smartphones and tablets. Conventional cellphone towers in neighborhoods are often opposed as eyesores, and sometimes banned. Churches offer an alternative.

Not so fast, some worshipers and residents near churches say.

Cell tower opponents contend there is a potential radiation danger to children and neighbors from cellular transmitters, an assertion that the wireless industry says is false.

The cellphone trade group CTIA says that emissions from the industry's towers are "thousands of times less than the FCC's limits for safe exposure," and it cites reports from the Federal Communications Commission asserting that no evidence links cancer to wireless devices or, according to the National Cancer Institute, to radio-frequency energy.

But in 2011, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified radio-frequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans, bolstering fears raised by tower opponents.

Earlier this year, parents in Burbank protested when plans were announced to install a T-Mobile cell site at the Little White Chapel. Twelve antennas were to be placed in the church's steeple and other equipment installed on the first floor of the sanctuary.

In May, the Burbank City Council unanimously declined to approve the Planning Board's OK of the project, which was based on a 2011 ordinance allowing antennas on institutional buildings such as churches and schools.

In Tujunga, parents and others, citing aesthetic grounds, have protested plans for a Metro PCS cell tower disguised as a pine tree at Our Lady of Lourdes School.

Verizon had better luck in October when the Camarillo Planning Commission approved a conditional use permit for a dozen cellular antennas inside a 53-foot church steeple and cross at Trinity Presbyterian Church.

The idea is not new. In 1997, Nextel Communications sought to place a tower on the playground of Holy Redeemer School in Montrose but stopped its plans after parents complained.

But the trend may be accelerating: A recent survey by California Watch, an investigative reporting group, noted that no one keeps track how many churches in California have cell sites but found that some congregations actively market themselves.

The Canyon Creek Presbyterian Church in San Ramon sought out wireless providers when it was constructing a building six years ago and eventually struck a deal with T-Mobile that brings $25,000 to $30,000 a year to the church.

While the church lost part of its property tax exemption because of the cell site, it still comes out financially ahead.

Churches with cell sites say they welcome the income from working out lease deals with wireless companies. It can total as much as $4,000 a month.

The Green Hills Baptist Church in La Habra first leased space to Pac Bell about 20 years ago, said Pastor Bob Gallina. These days the nine or so T-Mobile transmitters that are attached to an outdoor cross bring in about $20,000 annually, he said.

Legal experts say ministers and other church leaders should read the fine print closely when considering a carrier's offer. "Often church people are entirely too trusting," said John W. Pestle, a Tucson-area lawyer who frequently advises property owners who are considering hosting cell sites.

Long-term leases can stymie a church that needs to physically expand in the future, Pestle said. And because wireless companies prefer to keep lease amounts confidential, churches may have difficulty comparing rates.

Until now, the growth in cell sites tucked in steeples, bell towers and in crosses has been modest; only a couple of hundred of the 5,000 new sites built in the U.S. this year were in churches, said Ken Schmidt, president of the consulting firm Steel in the Air based in Ft. Myers, Fla.

But that could change as wireless companies ramp up service. Schmidt said AT&T has announced plans to add 10,000 additional macro cell sites on tall towers and 40,000 smaller, shorter-range sites on existing buildings.

That means churches with tall towers and steeples close to neighborhoods will be sought out by the wireless industry.

Carriers may pass the collection plate among customers to pay for the new cell sites.

bob.pool@latimes.com

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Acer’s $99 Android tablet might not launch in the U.S.

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Reaction to the death of actor Jack Klugman

Celebrities on Monday reacted to the death of "Odd Couple" star Jack Klugman, who died Monday at age 90. Here are samples of sentiments expressed on Twitter:

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"R.I.P. Jack Klugman, Oscar, Quincy a man whose career spanned almost 50 years. I first saw him on the Twilight Zone. Cool guy wonderful actor." — Whoopi Goldberg.

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"You made my whole family laugh together." — Actor Jon Favreau, of "Swingers," ''Iron Man" and other films.

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"I worked with Jack Klugman several years ago. He was a wonderful man and supremely talented actor. He will be missed" — Actor Max Greenfield, of the "New Girl" on Fox.

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"So sorry to hear that Jack Klugman passed away. I learned a lot, watching him on television" — Dan Schneider, creator of Nickelodeon TV shows "iCarly," ''Drake and Josh" ''Good Burger," ''Drake & Josh."

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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?

Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.

Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.

That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.

Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.

In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.

In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.

Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.

But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.

The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.

The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.

Other rumors also spring from real events.

In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.

Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.

So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.

Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.

In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.

The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”

The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.

The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.

The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.

The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.

The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.

In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.

In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.

Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.

But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

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BitTorrent co-founder now working with Hollywood

A Silicon Valley executive whose previous venture was synonymous with Internet piracy has found a way to play nice with Hollywood.

BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin is working with television networks and consumer electronics companies on a new technology called Samba that aims to deliver enhanced viewing on Internet-connected "smart TVs."

Navin said his experiences with BitTorrent and the backlash engendered by the file-sharing pioneer spurred his decision to work in collaboration with the entertainment industry — instead of pursing a path of business disruption.

"You can get a lot of great press, you can get all the bloggers and social media folks really excited with statements like, 'I'm here to kill cable,'" said Navin, 35. "But that doesn't actually work. It's not productive,

because cable and subscription television is subsidizing and paying for the programming we love."

Navin's San Francisco company, Flingo, draws from the same body of academic research for Samba that underlies the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's face recognition technology to teach smart TVs to "see" the images flickering on the screen.

Like an infant opening her eyes for the first time, the software is trained to recognize actors' faces and objects on the screen. It uses these visual cues to identify a show in real time by comparing it with a database of hundreds of channels of content.

Once Samba determines what a viewer is watching, it delivers contextually relevant content, such as casting information or social media conversations, directly to the TV — as well as to other screens in the room. The software synchronizes the devices automatically, via the Internet, so the consumer doesn't need to download a special application. The supplemental material is available through a Web browser running on a tablet, smartphone or the TV itself.

"From a consumer point of view, [Flingo's] doing a nice job of stitching these things together based around a TV-centric experience," said Paul Gray, television research director for NPD DisplaySearch. "And not trying to be a PC in your living room — which is the big danger."

Flingo is one of several companies seeking to serve as the technological glue that connects the living room TV with the smartphones, tablets or laptop computers that millions of consumers have in their hands, along with their TV remote controls. One Nielsen study found that 86% of tablet owners and 84% of smartphone users said they check these screens while they watch TV. Television networks have been grappling with the intrusion of these small screens, which compete with the TV for viewers' attention.

"If we can find ways to connect those screens, we can deepen the engagement with the show, we can remind people that they are watching TV," said Hardie Tankersley, Fox's vice president of platforms and innovation. "Being able to match the ads that you're seeing on your laptop with the ads that are running on TV — that has tremendous potential for brands, who advertise both on TV and the Web. To be able to synchronize up is really powerful."

Companies such as Zeebox, Yahoo Inc.'s IntoNow and Shazam Entertainment Ltd. offer smartphone and tablet applications that identify TV shows and deliver supplementary content to this second, smaller screen — including cast lists, a plot synopsis and interactive features such as polling.

Flingo's Navin is placing his bet on a different screen: the TV. Announcements of partnerships with device makers are expected next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Smart TVs are moving from a novelty to the mainstream, with shipments expected to grow 15% worldwide this year, according to NPD DisplaySearch. Some 43 million of these devices — TVs that connect to the Internet and provide access to services such as YouTube, Netflix or Hulu — are expected to ship globally this year. That number is projected to reach 95 million by 2016.

This momentum is less obvious in North America, where Internet-connected TVs have been slower to catch on than other parts of the world, Gray said. That's because purchases are linked to media consumption habits. In China, for example, consumers watch free Internet content — and favor TVs with built-in browsers, which make it easier to watch streaming video. Similarly, in Western Europe, where half the households receive TV programming via over-the-air signals, broadcasters provide past episodes free online for consumers to do catch-up viewing. That's helped spur demand for Internet-connected TVs, Gray said.

Navin launched Flingo in 2008, creating smart TV applications for networks including A&E, Fox, History Channel, Lifetime, Showtime and TMZ, as well as websites such as Revision3, Funny or Die and College Humor. As a result of this development work, the company has built relationships with more than a dozen major consumer electronics manufacturers, among them LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Corp. and Vizio Inc. It claims to have published more smart TV apps than any other company in the world — available on more than 15 million devices in 118 countries.

That may position it to take serious advantage of smart TV growth in the U.S.

"The smart TV is the last great unmined consumer platform," said billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who saw a demonstration of Flingo at the CES trade show last year and is an investor in the company.

dawn.chmielewski@latimes.com

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Baker's giant thermometer, long on the blink, is taking heat

BAKER — The temperature hit 114 degrees in July, but most folks passing by the "World's Tallest Thermometer" in this Mojave Desert pit stop never knew it.

Once a shimmering beacon of light to Las Vegas-bound drivers heading up Interstate 15 with fat wallets and paper-thin dreams, Baker's 13-story thermometer marks California's last-stop oasis of bathrooms and burger joints before the Nevada state line.

Now it's an eyesore. The pinkish roadside oddity has been on the blink for years. The string of ovals that lighted up in 10-degree increments, the top one also giving the exact temperature, are black and lifeless. The gift shop below is padlocked, its shelves stripped bare.

"It's totally disappointing,'' said Brad Roach, 27, of Los Alamos, N.M., who pulled off the highway on an L.A.-to-Vegas road trip with friends to get a closer look. "It's kind of like the biggest ball of twine," he said, referring to another storied American roadside attraction. "If you're diving by, you have to stop and see it. But there's nothing here.''

The thermometer's demise now serves as a billboard for a town on the brink. A chain link fence surrounds Baker's prized Starbucks — which closed its doors four years ago. Two of the town's three motels are shut. The Royal Hawaiian, which in the best of times aspired to two stars, peeks sadly out onto Baker Boulevard with smashed windows and graffiti-splattered walls.

Part of the blame belongs to the merciless Mojave Desert, where bleached 2-by-4s and cinder blocks are all that remains of gas stations, diners and other ventures that turned to dust along the highways. Part of the decline can be blamed on the recession, which depleted the conga line of vehicles heading to and from Las Vegas that sustains life in this tiny town of 735 on the edge of Death Valley.

Tough times are nothing new in this desert town, born more than century ago as a railroad station serving the borax mines in Death Valley. It was wiped off the map by floods in the '30s and saw its rails pulled up and shipped overseas during World War II. There still isn't a single stoplight in town.

Still, its people persevere. "There's always been work in Baker, but now, instead of one job, people are working two or three,'' said Ronda Tremblay, superintendent of the Baker Valley United School District, which has fewer than 190 students.

Baker has no bank or supermarket, no drugstore or health clinic — those are an hour's drive away, in Barstow.

But some hold out hope for the town and, not surprisingly in these parts, it could come from an unusual place: a spaceship.

The owner of Alien Fresh Jerky, one of the more popular stops on Baker's main drag, has plans to build a three-story, disc-shaped "UFO Hotel." Still in the permitting process, it would tower over the tiny markets, gas stations and restaurants on Baker's main drag. Plans call for a gift shop, cafe and 30-plus rooms. Outside, there would be a pool in the shape of an alien's noggin for guests to take a dip in on hot summer days.

"Forty percent of Americans believe in UFOs. Those are my customers," Luis Ramallo said. "No one has ever seen anything like it.''

A wacky dream? Perhaps. But Ramallo, an electrician who emigrated from Argentina in 1988, has parlayed on those before with great success. His beef jerky store started as a tiny, roadside stand outside of Nevada's Area 51, the top secret U.S. Air Force base that has morphed into the Bethlehem of UFO theology. After Ramallo's oddball enterprise became a hit, he relocated to Baker.

Now his store, on good days, has a line snaking out the door, Ramallo said. He expects even more business once the spaceship hotel opens, which he hopes will be in the next year or two.

"This will be the new big attraction in Baker,'' Ramallo said. "I don't want them to fix the thermometer. I want them to tear it down. It's gone from good to bad to ugly.''

The 134-foot-high thermometer was the brainchild of local businessman Willis Herron, who plunked down $700,000 to build the giant monolith in 1991 next to his Bun Boy Restaurant. The thermometer's 4,900 bulbs glowed so bright that Herron, who lived across the street, had to close his window shades at night.

"For 25 years I've had this dream of putting up the world's tallest thermometer, because people pulling off the freeway in the heat of summer are always making remarks like: 'Whew! It's hotter 'n hell. How hot is it anyway?'" Herron, who died years ago, told the Times in 1991.

The tower's height commemorated the 134-degree record temperature set in nearby Death Valley in 1913.

Shortly after it was finished, the thermometer snapped in two after being buffeted by 70-mph winds. Two years later, the rebuilt thermometer again twisted and swayed as gusts whipped through the valley, popping out light bulbs. The problem was solved when a work crew poured concrete inside the steel tower, anchoring it against the harsh desert wind.

Herron sold the Bun Boy and the giant thermometer to business partner Larry Dabour, owner of the Mad Greek restaurant, another Baker institution. It changed hands again in 2005 when Dabour "liberated" himself from the thermometer, Bun Boy and some other enterprises he owned.

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Saudi website editor could face death for apostasy-rights group

RIYADH (Reuters) – The editor of a Saudi Arabian website could be sentenced to death after a judge cited him for apostasy and moved his case to a higher court, the monitoring group Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.

Raif Badawi, who started the Free Saudi Liberals website to discuss the role of religion in Saudi Arabia, was arrested in June, Human Rights Watch said.

Badawi had initially been charged with the less serious offence of insulting Islam through electronic channels, but at a December 17 hearing a judge referred him to a more senior court and recommended he be tried for apostasy, the monitoring group said.

Apostasy, the act of changing religious affiliation, carries an automatic death sentence in Saudi Arabia, along with crimes including blasphemy.

Badawi’s website included articles that were critical of senior religious figures, the monitoring group said.

A spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s Justice Ministry was not available to comment.

The world’s top oil exporter follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam and applies Islamic law, or sharia.

Judges base their decisions on their own interpretation of religious law rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.

King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, has pushed for reforms to the legal system, including improved training for judges and the introduction of precedent to standardize verdicts and make courts more transparent.

However, Saudi lawyers say that conservatives in the Justice Ministry and the judiciary have resisted implementing many of the changes that he announced in 2007. (Reporting By Angus McDowall; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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A huge collection of odd TV stuff needs a home

LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Comisar is the first to acknowledge that more than a few have questioned his sanity for spending the better part of 25 years collecting everything from the costume George Reeves wore in the 1950s TV show "Superman" to the entire set of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson."

Then there's the pointy Spock ears Leonard Nimoy wore on "Star Trek" and the guns Tony Soprano used to rub out a mob rival in an episode of "The Sopranos."

"Along the way people thought I was nuts in general for wanting to conserve Keith Partridge's flared pants from 'The Partridge Family,'" the good-natured former TV writer says of the 1970s sitcom as he ambles through rows of costumes, props and what have you from the beginnings of television to the present day.

"But they really thought I needed a psychological workup," Comisar, 48, adds with a smile, "when they learned I was having museum curators take care of these pieces."

A museum is exactly where he wants to put all 10,000 of his TV memorabilia items, everything from the hairpiece Carl Reiner wore on the 1950s TV variety program "Your Show of Shows" to the gun and badge Kiefer Sutherland flashed on "24" a couple TV seasons ago.

Finding one that could accommodate his collection, which fills two sprawling, temperature-controlled warehouses, however, has sometimes been as hard as acquiring the boots Larry Hagman used to stomp around in when he was J.R. on "Dallas." (The show's production company finally coughed up a pair after plenty of pleading and cajoling.)

Comisar is one of many people who, after a lifetime of collecting, begin to realize that if they can't find a permanent home for their artifacts those objects could easily end up on the trash heap of history. Or, just as bad as far as he's concerned, in the hands of private collectors.

"Some of the biggest bidders for Hollywood memorabilia right now reside in mainland China and Dubai, and our history could leave this country forever," says Comisar, who these days works as a broker and purchasing expert for memorabilia collectors.

What began as a TV-obsessed kid's lark morphed into a full-fledged hobby when as a young man writing jokes for Howie Mandel and Joan Rivers, and punching up scripts for such producers as Norman Lear and Fred Silverman, Comisar began scouring studio back lots, looking for discarded stuff from the favorite shows of his childhood. From there it developed into a full-on obsession, dedicated to preserving the entire physical spectrum of television history.

"After a couple years of collecting, it became clear to me," he says, "that it didn't much matter what TV shows James watched in the early 1970s but which shows were the most iconic. In that way, I had sort of a curator's perspective almost from the beginning."

In the early days, collecting such stuff was easy for anyone with access to a studio back lot. Many items were simply thrown out or given away when shows ceased production. When studios did keep things they often rented them out for small fees, and if you lost or broke them you paid a small replacement fee. So Comisar began renting stuff right and left and promptly losing it, acquiring one of Herman Munster's jackets that way.

These days almost everything has a price, although Comisar's reputation as a serious collector has led some people to give him their stuff.

If he simply sold it all, he could probably retire as a millionaire several times over. Just last month someone paid $480,000 for a faded dress Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz." What might Annette Funicello's original Mickey Mouse Club jacket fetch?

He won't even think about that.

"I've spent 25 years now reuniting these pieces, and I would be so sick if some day they were just broken up and sold to the highest bidder," he says.

He, and every other serious collector of cool but somewhat oddball stuff, face two major obstacles, say museum curators: Finding a museum or university with the space to take their treasures and persuading deep-pocketed individuals who might bankroll the endeavor that there's really any compelling reason to preserve something like Maxwell Smart's shoephone.

"People hold television and popular culture so close to their hearts and embrace it so passionately," says Dwight Bowers, curator of entertainment collections for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, who calls Comisar's collection very impressive. "But they don't put it on the same platform as military history or political history."

When the Smithsonian acquired Archie Bunker's chair from the seminal TV comedy "All in the Family," Bowers said, museum officials took plenty of flak from those offended that some sitcom prop was being placed down the hallway from the nation's presidential artifacts.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, took similar heat when it accepted the Grateful Dead archives, 30 years of recordings, videos, papers, posters and other memorabilia gifted by the band, said university archivist Nicholas Meriwether.

"What I always graciously say is that if you leave the art and the music aside for one moment, whatever you think of it, what you can say is they are still a huge part of understanding the story of the 1960s and of understanding the nation's counterculture," says Meriwether.

Comisar sees his television collection serving the same purpose, tracing societal changes TV shows documented from the post-World War II years to the present.

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation looked into establishing such a museum some years back, and Comisar's collection came up at the time, said Karen Herman, curator of the foundation's Archive of American Television.

Instead, the foundation settled on an online archive containing more than 3,000 hours of filmed oral history interviews with more than 700 people.

While the archive doesn't have any of Mr. Spock's ears, anyone with a computer can view and listen to an oral history from Spock himself, the actor Leonard Nimoy.

Comisar, meanwhile, believes he's finally found the right site for a museum, in Phoenix, where he's been lining up supporters. He estimates it will cost $35 million and several years to open the doors, but hopes to have a preview center in place by next year.

Mo Stein, a prominent architect who heads the Phoenix Community Alliance and is working with him, says one of the next steps will be finding a proper space for the collection.

But, really, why all the fuss over a place to save one of the suits Regis Philbin wore on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"?

"In Shakespeare's time, his work was considered pretty low art," Comisar responds.

Oh, he'll admit that "Mike and Molly," the modern TV love story of a couple who fall for each other at Overeaters Anonymous, may never rank in the same category as "Romeo and Juliet."

"But what about a show like 'Star Trek'?" he asks.

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N.Y.U. and Others Offer Shorter Courses Through Medical School

Training to become a doctor takes so long that just the time invested has become, to many, emblematic of the gravity and prestige of the profession.

But now one of the nation’s premier medical schools, New York University, and a few others around the United States are challenging that equation by offering a small percentage of students the chance to finish early, in three years instead of the traditional four.

Administrators at N.Y.U. say they can make the change without compromising quality, by eliminating redundancies in their science curriculum, getting students into clinical training more quickly and adding some extra class time in the summer.

Not only, they say, will those doctors be able to hang out their shingles to practice earlier, but they will save a quarter of the cost of medical school — $49,560 a year in tuition and fees at N.Y.U., and even more when room, board, books, supplies and other expenses are added in.

“We’re confident that our three-year students are going to get the same depth and core knowledge, that we’re not going to turn it into a trade school,” said Dr. Steven Abramson, vice dean for education, faculty and academic affairs at N.Y.U. School of Medicine.

At this point, the effort involves a small number of students at three medical schools: about 16 incoming students at N.Y.U., or about 10 percent of next year’s entering class; 9 at Texas Tech Health Science Center School of Medicine; and even fewer, for now, at Mercer University School of Medicine’s campus in Savannah, Ga. A similar trial at Louisiana State University has been delayed because of budget constraints.

But Dr. Steven Berk, the dean at Texas Tech, said that 10 or 15 other schools across the country had expressed interest in what his university was doing, and the deans of all three schools say that if the approach works, they will extend the option to larger numbers of students.

“You’re going to see this kind of three-year pathway become very prominent across the country,” Dr. Abramson predicted.

The deans say that getting students out the door more quickly will accomplish several goals. By speeding up production of physicians, they say, it could eventually dampen a looming doctor shortage, although the number of doctors would not increase unless the schools enrolled more students in the future.

The three-year program would also curtail student debt, which now averages $150,000 by graduation, and by doing so, persuade more students to go into shortage areas like pediatrics and internal medicine, rather than more lucrative specialties like dermatology.

The idea was supported by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to President Obama, and a colleague, Victor R. Fuchs. In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, they said there was “substantial waste” in the nation’s medical education. “Years of training have been added without evidence that they enhance clinical skills or the quality of care,” they wrote. They suggested that the 14 years of college, medical school, residency and fellowship that it now takes to train a subspecialty physician could be reduced by 30 percent, to 10 years.

That opinion, however, is not universally held. Other experts say that a three-year medical program would deprive students of the time they need to delve deeply into their subjects, to consolidate their learning and to reach the level of maturity they need to begin practicing, while adding even more pressure to a stressful academic environment.

“The downside is that you are really tired,” said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting agency for medical schools in the United States and Canada. But because accreditation standards do not dictate the fine points of curriculum, the committee has approved N.Y.U.’s proposal, which exceeds by five weeks its requirement that schools provide at least 130 weeks of medical education.

The medical school is going ahead with its three-year program despite the damage from Hurricane Sandy, which forced NYU Langone Medical Center to evacuate more than 300 patients at the height of the storm and temporarily shut down three of its four main teaching hospitals.

Dr. Abramson of N.Y.U. said that postgraduate training, which typically includes three years in a hospital residency, and often fellowships after that, made it unnecessary to try to cram everything into the medical school years. Students in the three-year program will have to take eight weeks of class before entering medical school, and stay in the top half of their class academically. Those who do not meet the standards will revert to the four-year program.

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