A home run

Fellow Americans - President Obama hit a home run with his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court -- and not just because she's the "woman who saved baseball" by ending the strike in 1995, nor simply because she would be the first Latina ever to serve on the high court. It was a home run because in her three-decade career as a prosecutor, judge, private litigator and law professor, she has time and again earned bipartisan praise as one of America's finest legal minds. And it was the right choice because Judge Sotomayor -- herself born and raised in a South Bronx housing project -- has summed up the American dream in her own incredible story and never once forgotten how the law affects our daily lives. Now her historic nomination goes to the Senate. I know that process well, and I can tell you that the debate of the coming weeks and months will be shaped by the public response in the next few hours and days. It's critical that the Senate and the public clearly see where the American people stand. Will you add your name to the growing list of Americans who are pledging to "Stand with Sotomayor" today? Your name and comments will become part of a public display of support at this crucial time. I've followed Judge Sotomayor's remarkable journey for years. I voted for her when President George H.W. Bush nominated her for the District Court in 1992, and I was proud to vote for her again when President Bill Clinton nominated her for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998. Born to a Puerto Rican family, Sotomayor grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx. She was an avid reader from an early age, and was first inspired to pursue a legal career by the Nancy Drew mystery novels. Driven by her mother's belief in the power of education and her own relentless work ethic, she excelled in school. She won a scholarship to Princeton University, graduated summa cum laude, and then went on to attend Yale Law School where she served as an editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal. Like President Obama, Sotomayor passed up many more lucrative opportunities after law school to put her degree to work for the public good. She served as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, tackling some of the hardest cases facing the city, including robberies, assaults, murders, police brutality, and child pornography. Her growing reputation for fearlessness and legal brilliance prompted her first nomination to the federal bench, and she's only continued to soar. If confirmed, she would start with more federal judicial experience than any Justice in a century, more overall judicial experience than any Justice in 70 years, and replace David Souter as the only Justice with firsthand experience as a trial judge. She has participated in over 3,000 panel decisions and authored roughly 400 opinions, expertly handling difficult issues of constitutional law, complicated procedural matters, and lawsuits involving complex business organizations. In her years on the bench, Judge Sotomayor has earned acclaim from legal scholars and experts from both sides of the aisle for her intellectual toughness, her probing oral questioning, and her ability to issue decisions that hold both factual details and legal doctrines in equal measure. And she's never failed to apply a steady, common-sense analysis of how the law touches our daily lives. Her story is incredible. Her qualifications are undeniable. And her judgment will serve us all well on the highest court in the land. Please join me in becoming a part of this historic moment for the Court and our country. Add your name now to publicly show that you, too, "Stand with Sotomayor." In these crucial early hours, let us leave no doubt about the people's support for this extraordinary nominee. http://my.barackobama.com/sotomayorstand Thank you, Vice President Joe Biden

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My Supreme Court nominee

Fellow Americans, I am proud to announce my nominee for the next Justice of the United States Supreme Court: Judge Sonia Sotomayor. This decision affects us all -- and so it must involve us all. I've recorded a special message to personally introduce Judge Sotomayor and explain why I'm so confident she will make an excellent Justice. Please watch the video, and then pass this note on to friends and family to include them in this historic moment. Judge Sotomayor has lived the America Dream. Born and raised in a South Bronx housing project, she distinguished herself in academia and then as a hard-charging New York District Attorney. Judge Sotomayor has gone on to earn bipartisan acclaim as one of America's finest legal minds. As a Supreme Court Justice, she would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any Justice in 100 years. Judge Sotomayor would show fidelity to our Constitution and draw on a common-sense understanding of how the law affects our day-to-day lives. A nomination for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land is one of the most important decisions a President can make. And the discussions that follow will be among the most important we have as a nation. You can begin the conversation today by watching this special message and then passing it on: http://my.barackobama.com/SupremeCourt Thank you, President Barack Obama

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[FWD: Fin What Already Works Well For You]

A friend of mine emailed this to me last week, and thought it had a nugget or two.

THE GOLDILOCKS PRINCIPLE

A client complained to me recently that he needed to become more disciplined, as he was failing to hit his targets in several key areas of his business. Years ago when I was first starting out as a coach I might have taken his complaint seriously and worked with him on becoming "a more disciplined person", even taking the time to explore his patterns of self-sabotage and encouraging him to 'just try harder' and 'focus more' on what he really wanted.

But it's become more and more clear to me over the years that success is less a matter of becoming a different kind of person than of finding what already works well for us and doing more of it. In other words, what holds us back is not some flaw in our character, but rather a blind spot in our understanding. I call this "the Goldilocks principle" - the idea that there is always a way of doing anything that fits just right for you.

Do you think you're too lazy to succeed? Consider the story of Marc Allen, the millionaire publisher behind such personal development classics as Creative Visualization and The Power of Now. I had to get special permission to interview him for my radio show at 11am one week as he normally won't do anything remotely business related until after lunch, a habit he engendered long before he achieved his financial success.

Are you not tough enough to make it in the dog-eat-dog world of business? Then you might find it difficult to account for the multi-million dollar financial and socially conscious success of hippie-ice cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who balance the demands of their conscience with the demands of running a successful company by creating an imaginary entity they call "the monster" that makes their difficult business decisions for them. As Ben reputedly told Jerry when economic realities made it necessary to let employees go, "the monster is hungry - the monster must eat!"

I told my client the story of a man who designed new buildings for college campuses. In his original designs, the man used to draw in not only the new building but also the routes of access - all the sidewalks to and from the parking lots and other buildings. But to his dismay, when he would visit the campuses months later, he could see that students (and even some teachers) were often ignoring the sidewalks and making their own pathways to the new buildings, ruining the grass and making for some awkward patterns of foot traffic.

Rather than complain about the disrespectful students and irresponsible teachers, the designer came up with an innovative idea. Instead of trying to create a pre-determined path for people to follow, he began designing and placing the buildings without putting in any sidewalks at all. Then, after the building has been in use for a while, his team comes in and builds the sidewalks where the footpaths have naturally evolved.

The point is, you can either try to adapt yourself to fit in to what you think of as the "right way to succeed", or you can employ the Goldilocks principle and find a way to succeed that fits "just right" for you.

And as George Bernard Shaw famously said:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

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Obituary: Marian Wagstaff dies at 97

By Elaine Woo

May 24, 2009

Marian Wagstaff, a far-sighted educator who turned a Compton school into a model of racial harmony and integrated its faculty years before the court rulings and civil rights protests of the 1950s and '60s, died April 26 at a nursing home in Santa Cruz. She was 97.

Her death was due to old age, said a friend, Wini Jackson.

Wagstaff, who was white, became principal of Willowbrook Junior High School in 1945, as World War II ended and the demographics of Compton began to change. She integrated the faculty, hiring the school's first black teacher in 1949, and created a camp in the San Bernardino Mountains to promote interracial cooperation that eventually drew students from schools across Los Angeles County.

She left Willowbrook in 1952 to teach at Cal State L.A., where she trained new teachers for two decades and perpetuated the philosophy of all races and ethnicities working together that she called "the Willowbrook Way."

"At Willowbrook she created a cocoon that was a beacon to the future," said Adrian Dove, past president of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, who graduated from Willowbrook in 1950. "We didn't know that everybody didn't just get along."

Dove helped organize a tribute dinner at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1999 that was attended by several hundred graduates of Centennial High School, where Willowbrook students matriculated.

Although Wagstaff never worked at Centennial, she influenced generations of its students, including Dove, through the Willowbrook teachers who later joined the Centennial faculty.

One of those teachers was John Redfud, who had taught in Louisiana before moving to Los Angeles to earn his master's degree at USC in the 1940s.

Despite his qualifications, he could not find a teaching job in Los Angeles until Wagstaff hired him at Willowbrook in the early 1950s. A charismatic teacher who was known for his high expectations and inspirational tactics, Redfud went on to help open Centennial High.

Another of Wagstaff's hires, Aaron Wade, went from Willowbrook and Centennial to become superintendent of the Compton school district.

"I didn't hire black teachers. I hired the best teachers," Wagstaff said in The Times in 1999. "I would only hire those teachers who loved children and who were great teachers. That was all that mattered to me."

Wagstaff was born April 23, 1912, in San Francisco. Her father, Harry Alexander Cavassa, was an Italian immigrant who ran a successful pharmacy and was known for his progressive views.

After graduating from San Francisco State, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse in South San Francisco for 10 years, until she moved to Southern California in 1943 to become Willowbrook's assistant principal. By then she had earned a master's degree at Stanford University. She earned a doctorate at Stanford in 1958.

She married Wendell Wagstaff, a civil engineer, in 1940. He died in 1998. They had no children.

During her seven-year tenure as Willowbrook principal, Wagstaff hired four black teachers. Dove recalled that some white teachers and students left the school in protest, but that most stayed.

Wagstaff created an array of clubs and other activities to strengthen relations within the diversifying student body.

She had Japanese American students recently released from World War II relocation camps going to dances with the sons and daughters of Dust Bowl refugees, Mexican migrants and black war veterans.

Her embrace of multiculturalism preceded Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation, and the civil rights protests of Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"She was blatantly going against the grain," Dove said, recalling that Wagstaff began integrating Willowbrook's faculty soon after an incident at Fremont High School in South-Central Los Angeles, where two black students were hung in effigy in 1948.

In 1951 and again in 1952, Willowbrook was one of 40 schools nationwide to be honored by the Freedoms Foundation in Valley Forge, Pa., for teaching what the foundation called the American way of life.

To Wagstaff, that meant looking beyond skin color to bring Americans together.

On the way to Valley Forge in 1952, she stopped for lunch at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., with two of her student body presidents -- Joyce Ewing, who was black, and Eddie Martinez, a Latino -- and their local hostess, a distinguished African American woman. They were refused service by the white-run establishment.

The African American woman looked pained, Martinez recalled. But Wagstaff "just smiled, reached over and grabbed her friend and said, 'Come, dear, we'll find another restaurant.' She was way above it," said Martinez, an artist who has created works for Disney theme parks.

"She represented a better way . . . to not look at people superficially but as human beings," Martinez said in an interview Friday. "That's what I learned from her."

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. June 27 at a site to be determined on the Cal State L.A. campus. For more information, contact Warner Davis at (760) 721-5297 or Vic Pierce at vicpierce@earthlink.net.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

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