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will probably satisfy the demands of a court order but it will not achieve genuine racial integration. Real integration involves far more than an even number of whites vs blacks in a school.
Enough about integration problems for the moment. Inglewood had some other problems that required attention. When I arrived in Inglewood in April 1966, they were attempting to connect the district to television programs being broadcast from the Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools headquarters. The idea seemed to be that we would have a large "master" antenna to pick up the County programs and then would "re-beam" them to any classroom or classrooms in the district. Each school was supposed to have a large antenna to receive these programs and then pipe them to all the classrooms. Some $60,000 had already been expended before I arrived and not one program had been shown in any school.
The work on wiring was being done by district personnel on an over time basis. I had a long talk with the man in charge of the project and it was apparent to me that he was in over his head and had neither the training or the experience to make the system work. I had great concern about the whole project and I instructed him to concentrate on one school only and to get the system functioning there. It turned out that the whole design was faulty and could not be made to work. We were out $60,000 and had a great deal of explaining to do.
There were also some other peculiar practices in the District. They had never bought a new truck or car. Rather they purchased vehicles from war surplus and then spent a great deal to re-build them. They also wasted hours of man-power because of crews waiting for equipment to be repaired.
Inglewood is an old town and was an ideal small town until all the turmoil of integration turned it upside down. There is a large city park in the north section called Centinella Park. Years ago there was a large spring at this site and the waters from the spring were used to irrigate the Freeman Farm. Today Daniel Freeman Hospital stands on a part of that old farm. This hospital is operated by a nursing order of the Catholic Church and the hospital is known world wide for some of its medical practices.
While I was in Inglewood the Forum was built by Jack Kent Cooke, then owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. The Lakers were playing in Los Angeles Sports Arena at first but were asked repeatedly to revise their schedule of games to accommodate another organization. This was very upsetting so Cooke appealed to the County Board of Supervisors for better control of his scheduling arrangement. In fact, he told them that if he could not get better control of his schedules, he would just have to build his own arena. The Supervisors laughed at him and refused to make any changes. Cooke bought a large piece of land in Inglewood and built the Forum. The Sports Arena was an empty shell for a few years after the Forum was completed.
In 1969, the Inglewood School District was holding a tax election and we were trying to drum up support for the proposition. Another fellow and I went to Jack Kent Cooke's office in Beverley Hills to try to get him to endorse the tax election. He thought we
