S IGNA L T R I BU N E Serving Bixby Knolls, California Heights, Los Cerritos, Wrigley and Signal Hill
Your Weekly Community Newspaper
VOL. XXXIX NO. 20
May 12, 2017
Long Beach VA hospital named after Holocaust survivor, war hero
Local artist-veteran honors Tibor Rubin with portrait for new facility.
Cory Bilicko Managing Editor
Courtesy Stewart Wavell-Smith
An acrylic painting created by artist Stewart Wavell-Smith of Holocaust survivor and war hero Tibor Rubin was unveiled Wednesday during a renaming ceremony at the Long Beach VA. The painting shows Rubin wearing his Medal of Honor, in front of the VA Medical Center that will now bear his name. Wavell-Smith’s portrait– a two-foot-by-three-foot acrylic painting titled “Shalom Tibor”– will reside in the restored lobby of the medical center upon completion of a construction project to seismically retrofit and upgrade the building.
It literally took an act of Congress, but the hospital at the Long Beach Veterans Administration is now the Tibor Rubin VA Medical Center, in honor of the late Holocaust survivor and Medal of Honor recipient. The local VA hosted a renaming ceremony Wednesday morning to honor the Jewish– and previously unsung– foreign-born hero who would eventually step up to serve in the US Army. Born in Hungary in 1929, Rubin, as a teenager, would endure 14 months in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria during World War II. His parents and younger sister were killed, but he was among those whom the US Army eventually liberated on May 5, 1945. That rescue inspired Rubin to enlist in the US Army, and he was eventually deployed in 1950 as a member of the 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division as a rifleman during the Korean War. Despite facing religious discrimination from a sergeant who sent him on the most dangerous assignments and then withheld his commendation, Rubin fought “valiantly in several notable engagements,” according to the office of Congressmember Alan Lowenthal (CA-47), who introduced legislation last year to rename the VA center in Rubin’s name. see RUBIN page 11
‘Betty broke the rules, by just being Betty’ Congressmember Lowenthal interviews former Assembly Member Karnette for HSLB. Cory Bilicko Managing Editor
An oral-history event the Historical Society of Long Beach (HSLB) presented Wednesday night was a spirited and often humorous conversation between two local Democratic leaders whose political scope has reached far beyond Long Beach. Congressmember Alan Lowenthal, who currently represents California’s 47th District, interviewed former State Assemblymember Betty Karnette during the almost twohour talk at Keesal, Young & Logan law firm in downtown Long Beach. The two were clearly quite comfortable with each other, and, in between jokes and mutual teasing, Karnette shared stories of having always been a leader (“because no one else wanted to do it”), her brief involvement with Scientology and even her penchant for fist-fighting
with boys– as a little girl. She even asked the audience for a show of hands of who else liked to fight. That scrappiness, coupled with an upbringing that promoted listening to and understanding others, is what appears to have characterized Karnette’s political career, which has seen its successes– authoring legislation requiring that voters be able to review the political contributions received by candidates for public office and legislation allowing the use of “battered woman syndrome” to be used in defense of those convicted of killing abusive spouses– as well as challenges– being one of only a few women in the State Assembly and being narrowly defeated by Steven T. Kuykendall in 1994 after having already served a term. That defeat did not dim her enthusiasm for holding public office, as she was elected to the California State Senate to serve from 1996 until she was termed out in 2004. During Wednesday night’s interview, Lowenthal first asked Karnette about her early life growing up in
4
Paducah, Kentucky. Karnette explained that segregation prevailed and, after she witnessed children from the African-American community attending schools separate from those of white kids, she joined the NAACP in junior college. “I was one of four white people that would let their names be used,” she said. “But there were more people that were sympathetic.” Lowenthal also emphasized Karnette’s teaching career and how she was instrumental in shaping the teacher’s union in Los Angeles. “You played a major role in the changing of a major union in this country,” Lowenthal said to Karnette, explaining that she was elected to the state legislature in 1992, a time when that governmental body was dominated by men. “Most of the women, when they got there, realized that nobody was listening to them,” Lowenthal said. “That’s what the rules were, that’s what the game was. Betty broke the rules, by just being Betty. She didn’t
Cory Bilicko | Signal Tribune
Former State Assemblymember Betty Karnette (left) was the subject of an oral-history interview conducted by Congressmember Alan Lowenthal (right) Wednesday night at Keesal, Young & Logan law firm.
know she wasn’t ‘supposed’ to be in that meeting. It was great. So, I just want to know how that developed. Were you an activist as a teacher too?”
Karnette said she has always been an activist and that her drive to get things accomplished was modeled see KARNETTE page 8