February 19, 2025 • 24 mins
Experts see ‘hallmarks of government censorship’ in FCC’s latest investigation of radio station. If it feels like there are suddenly way more plane crashes and incidents… here’s the truth. Could and early 20th century idea help Altadena rebuild? Remember the Sears Catalog?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
KFI AM six forty Bill Handle. Here it is a
Wednesday morning, February nineteenth. Some of the stories we're looking
at President Trump President Putin are expected to meet before
the end of the month.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Now, first Amendment case really a good one.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We start with the head of the FCC, newly appointed
head of the SCC, Brendan Carr, and he is well,
let me put it this way. He was on a
Fox show, strangely enough, and he was appointed by the president.
And he announced that the FCC is investigating KCBS San
(00:48):
Francisco AM station over its coverage of the administration's mass
deportation raids in San Jose. And here's what happens, or
here's what happened. You have kcbas read looking at a
raid that is happening in real time and saying, there's
an undercover car over there, here are agents over there,
(01:10):
all of this in real time, and he is arguing
that got in the way of law enforcement. You can't
do that. Of course, First Amendment people are going, wait
a minute, we sure as hell can. What we're doing
is reporting what is happening So that is one issue.
And the other issue, which I think is more fun,
(01:31):
only because I have a personal experience with this, is
there was against CBS. There's a move that's being taken.
This is a civil suit Trump is doing for ten
billion dollars because sixty Minutes in an interview with Kamala
Harris and edited it to look like she was answering
(01:54):
the question one way when she was answering a question
the other way. And he wants ten billion dollars of
interesting to see what damages they are because what happened
as a result. Oh, I don't know. He won. So
where's he going to get his ten billion dollars even
if a jury agrees with him.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yes, KSEBS or CBS.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Wrongly edited the Kamalay Harris interview.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Okay, now what you won?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So case in point because I have some experience with this,
not particularly running for president or winning, but being interviewed
by sixty minutes. And this happened in the early eighties
when sixty Minutes I was doing a doing one of
his segments on surrogacy, and I was a big part
of it because there were two of us on the
planet that were doing surroget parenting law, and so I
(02:46):
was I was a guest. I was featured on sixty
minutes and they ran I don't know, forty seconds of
me saying things and then an interview there. I was
filmed for three hours. That's how long. The interview ran
three hours, and they ran about a minute and a
(03:08):
half of it. And that's simply the way they operate.
And there is no such thing as unbiased. It doesn't exist.
And it's a question of how much bias there is.
You go to Fox, MSNBC, that's biased. You go to Newsmax,
that's crazy bias. It's all biased. And case in point,
(03:29):
let me tell you about a story that broke another
personal story and goes to show you that there is
bias no matter what, and just one word can change
everything much less a series of questions. When I was
doing one of my clients was Tag Romney, who was
Mitt Romney's son in the middle of his run for presidency,
(03:50):
and he was a client of ours and had a
kid with us and was on a second child. And
what we do is we have a ten plate, an
abortion template, an abortion clause in our contract that says
that the surrogate mother will not have an abortion under
(04:11):
these circumstances. Child is anomaloust or whatever has a genetic
disorder such that the child will not have a quality
of life, and the parents make that decision, followed by
a paragraph in font into the world headline saying that
this clause cannot be enforced under Roe v Way, there
is no such thing as enforcing.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
These this clause. Okay, fair enough with that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
The Romneys, who are very conservative Mormons and are not
particularly pro choice. What happened was that to remove that clause,
because that's our general clause.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
It has to be removed manually from my contract.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
And since it was the same surrogate and only the
dates were different, the clause ran in the second tract
that says the parents will decide if.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
The surrogate is to have an abortion. Yeha, okay Romney.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Romney's son just sighed a contract that says he has
the right to abort a child not even carried about
his own wife.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
How controversial is that?
Speaker 2 (05:15):
And this is the run for the presidency that Mitt
Romney was engaged in at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
TMZ picked up that story.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Someone got hold of the contract and sold it to TMZ,
and there it was his signature the abortion clause. Oh
my god, that was going to break wide open. Now
the good news is Harvey Levin is a friend of
mine who I have known, who runs and heads and
created TMZ. I've known him for over thirty five years. Actually,
(05:45):
he was my ethics professor in law school. Now let
me repeat that, the guy who created TMZ was my
ethics professor in law school. In any case, I talked
to him and said, the story has to break. But
here is the difference. One word difference, and that is
(06:06):
I explained to him what happened, that the paralegal just
put in the wrong paragraph and it was a mistake,
and then we crossed it out and did a new contract.
And so here's how that line ran. Bill handle coma
director of the Center for Surrogate Parenting, explains what happens
(06:30):
versus claims what happens? You could use both, because I
made the claim and I explained, And which word do
you think has well I get the benefit of, of course,
the word explained as opposed to I claimed there was
a clerical error.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Kamala Harris was interviewed for Ours.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
And choosing what she says is biased no matter what
you do unless you run all the raw footage. And
that's exactly what Trump wants, by the way, he wants
all the raw footage, and he will see and you
know you have stutters. Oh here's another one. You get
the raw footage, and you have the interviewee going uh
and sort of missing a word, either either a malapropism
(07:21):
or missing the sentence completely, and you know, missing misconstruing.
And that's what's run goes to show you what a
moron she is versus a tight, well conducted answer that
is cogent. You can do anything with that. So anyway,
(07:41):
what's happening is the FCC is going down hard on
KCBS right now and CBS, and it's you know, the
media is biased. By the way, the argument that the
media is biased towards the left I completely agree with.
And that's been going on forever because all the reporters
I've ever met are pretty left wing. Okay, airplane crashes.
(08:07):
Two things that come to mind whenever I say airplane crashes.
One is a look at the number of crashes that
have happened recently. Look at the number of incidents at
airports where there have been collisions or there have been
near collisions up in the air. You have the possibility
of collisions, you know, the planes missing each other by
a few hundred feet. Okay, scarier the hell airplane accidents.
(08:29):
I mean, they're just bound to happen. The other phrase
is flying airplanes is probably the safest way to travel
that's ever been invented. Second is true. First, not so much,
because if you look at the statistics in terms of
airplane debts, they are actually less than the last year
(08:56):
and less than they have been in decades. People just
don't die in airplanes. They don't fall out of the sky.
You don't usually see pilot error, you don't usually see
mechanical problems that cause deaths. It just doesn't happen, did it. Yeah,
it just happened in at Reagan International. We know that
at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, we had that plane
(09:19):
that flipped over and they're trying to figure out what happened.
It maybe came in too hard, don't know. No deaths
in that one, and of course all the deaths occurred
in the at Reagan International Airport. The reality is there
have been years in which no deaths have occurred, not
(09:41):
only in the United States, but all of the world
on scheduled airlines, it still is extraordinarily safe going out
on the road, and driving is far more dangerous statistically.
But even I don't get frightened when I drive on
the road. Do I think what's going to happen if
(10:03):
the plane goes down? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I do, even though I'm very comfortable flying.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
As I've told you many times, George Norry and I
have flown together a few times on the way to
Las Vegas, and we always have George Norri does the
overnight for people that don't know. He does the coast
to coast business with Poltergeist and Martian Anal.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Probes and whatever the hells he does.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
And we always argue about who's going to get Number
One building if the plane goes down, and I always
say he is going to and he always says I'm going.
To The point is I do consider that. I don't
consider that when I'm driving at all. Maybe it's because
a lack of control, maybe because I don't do it
every day. And I think most of us are in
(10:45):
the same position. And some people are scared to death
of flying because of the possibility. Because one of the
things you get in a car accident, you're good chance
you're going to survive or not be injured.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You fall out of the sky.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Ye airplane accident, You're not making it out on that one,
that's for sure. But the reality is it is safe
to fly. It is safer to fly now. So now
what ends up happening. You have these possible mid air
collisions where planes get too close to each other.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Well, that does happen?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Is it because it's being reported now because it's a
much bigger deal now, Yeah, I think that's the case.
By the way, the vast majority of deaths that do occur,
and we're talking in a bad year of a couple
one hundred, are in small planes. They're all in small
planes two three passenger little cessens or occasionally you have
a leered jet or a corporate jet. But those pilots
(11:44):
are pretty good. Plenty of young pilots two three hundred
hours in the air, not even forty hours in the air,
that are flying private planes. Those guys get in a.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Little bit of trouble. But even so, it's so rare.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
So next time you get on an airplane, let me
put it this way, I'm going to make you feel
a little bit better. There are so few deaths that
occur so rarely that I want you to think, when
you get on an airplane, you're due. Okay, statistically it's
(12:18):
about to happen to you. Have a good time, enjoy
your vacation. I want to go back to the fires, because,
as I said earlier, we're going to talk a lot
about the fires and one of the things and this
is Altadan, and we're going to talk about because Altadena
has a whole history of First of all, to say,
many African Americans live there.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
It is not a wealthy area like the Palisades.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
It is going to need more help probably, and rebuilding
all those thousands of homes is no easy.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Trick, and it can't be the traditional way of building.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Hire an architect, you go back to Department of Planning,
Building in Safety for the permits.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
It's just not going to be done. They're looking at alternatives.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
How are we going to do this, Well, let's make
the building process easier, let's make it faster, Let's figure
out some way of financing this.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Another way of doing it is.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Going back to what happened at the turn to the
last century when sears.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
The sears catalog sold homes.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Now it's not a question of listing homes, not a
question of selling them on the open market.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
It was a kit that you bought to build your house.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
For those people that buy model airplane kits for example,
which I did as a kid. Right, you got all
the pieces and you put them together and it took
a little while.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
You know, the glue and in this case was glue.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
But with the kits that you bought to build your home,
it was nails and lumber was all pre cut. I mean,
it was a kit where everything was supplied, the nails,
the screws, the electrical panels, I mean, everything other than
the foundation which had to be poured. And people built
their own homes. And if you think that was a
(14:07):
rare occurrence, they sold one hundred thousand of these homes.
And this was in a day and age where and
it was right out of the Seers catalog. I don't
know if you've ever seen a Sears catalog. It got
to the point where Sears, and this Sears was the
Amazon of its day. It went from a brick and
(14:31):
mortar store to a catalog store. Amazon started as a
catalog store on the internet. So the two have a
lot in common and everything that Amazon is today. Sears,
Roebuck and Company was that in the early nineteen hundreds
(14:52):
through the thirties, and it got to the point where
the Sears Catalog was four hundred pages and they would
be sent out and people would I mean, they couldn't
wait to get it. It was second only to the
Bible in people's homes. They would be used at outhouses
on a nail. The pages, the covers were framed and
(15:13):
put inside people's homes. I mean, it was extraordinary what
that was. And so you're looking back. They're looking back.
People are saying, Okay, do we go back to kit homes?
And they had a lot of them, but and they
had a lot of them, but the design was already there.
That's it. There was no building process other than putting
(15:34):
them together. And what I want to do, I want
to spend a few minutes just talking about the Sears
catalog itself.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
And the homes you could buy in talking about.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
The Altadena fires and rebuilding thousands of homes. New methods,
new ways of doing this simply have to be done.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
And the talk is.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
All about speeding up the process, building permits architectural absolutely,
maybe pre manufacture manufactured.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Homes, No one really knows.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Manufactured homes modernly are the closest thing to what I'm
going to talk about, and that is Sears catalog, the
kit homes that you put together yourself. And I'm going
to digress on the history of this because it's just
great fun when we're talking about it. I'm looking at
(16:33):
the Sears Catalog page of a home, a kit home
that was sent to you or sent to customers. Every nail,
every screw, every panel, every piece of wiring. Of course,
the lumber all sent via kit and it was delivered
on a railroad car and delivered to your house, to
(16:53):
your site. And I'm assuming you had to pour your
own foundation. They didn't ship a foundation. And so I'm
looking looking at a home and this is the Barrington
model home kit small house, one small bedroom, a living room,
not bad, by the way, fifteen by thirteen. Okay, So
(17:17):
let's go back and get into why Sears was doing this.
Because Sears was selling everything under the planet, everything, home goods,
farming equipment, virtually everything, jewelry.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
It started with jewelry, by the way.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
So the Modern Homes catalog was a separate catalog that
sold these kids. Nineteen o eight to nineteen forty is
when the homes were sold. At the beginning of nineteen eight.
The prices ranged from one hundred and seven dollars for
a home. That's thirty five hundred dollars today for a home,
(17:58):
a kit home. It's just ridiculous. Then you had the
highest level at that time with thirty five hundred dollars today.
No one hundred and thirteen one thousand dollars today, and
that was the Saratoga Flush. Toilets were not also included
because they were a luxury, although it did say any
(18:20):
of the houses in this book, this catalog can be
arranged with bathroom for a small additional charge. That was
the nineteen oh eight catalog. So Seares introduced three lines,
the simplex sectional, the Standard Built, the Honor Built, the
simplest sectional, the cheapest two rooms, no bathroom. It was
(18:42):
basically a cottage, a small cottage. However, it did have
ancillary buildings included outhouses, chicken coops, hoghouses were included in
the price. Different kind of clientele. Standard Built was built
for warmer climates because they couldn't retain heat. It was
(19:06):
a little tougher now. The Honor Built was the finest,
and it had cyprusiding, cedar shingles and maple trim that
went for in today's dollars, one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
I mean, it was a different, different world.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Nineteen eighteen, the Magnolia, a ten room Honor built mansion,
sold for fifty one hundred dollars. In this we're talking
nineteen eighteen dollars, about one hundred and one thousand dollars today.
Nineteen thirty nine. The last one, the Winnona Bungalow, the
cheapest model, sold for effectively today sixteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
The Malden, the kind of house that puts a.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Lift in your soul, sold for what today would be
fifty six thousand dollars. It's just completely crazy. Handle.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
I was checking this out looking you up because it
fascinates me as well. So apparently they sold over seventy
thousand of these homes between nineteen oh eight and nineteen forty,
and then.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
I show one hundred thousand, but that's okay, okay, roughly,
but okay, they say roughly seventy percent of them are
still standing to this day and that nuts. Yeah, and
they're a catalog home. That is a bit of history
that is extraordinary. But then I was sorry. I had
to be pretty handy to put together a house.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Well, they apparently destroyed Seers destroyed their sales records. No
one knows exactly. But there are these little there's these
little stamped these stamped wood on the unfinished areas like
the attic that apparently that you can tell if they
were one of these houses or not.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Isn't that insane? Yeah, it's just the history of this
is an incredible Sear sold cocaine, Sear sold heroin. No, now,
these were Yeah, these were medical miracles at the time
when you had nothing but quackery there and these were
doctors that produced these quack remedies and Sear sold them.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
I remember when they were when you'd get the Sears
wish book before Christmas and that's what you'd look through.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
You'd look through and that's what you picked.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
My dad worked at Sears when in the seventies doing displays,
design and displays, and so we always got what you know,
stuff from Sears and it was always scratching dent.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
I'm sure I am going.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
To end with a personal memory. I was, uh, what's
Cono doing. It was in the nineteen fifties. I was
just very, very small, and I remember this that in
the Sears parking lot in North Hollywood, they had a
very large Sears. Then we lived a couple of blocks away.
(22:06):
Sears was selling bomb shelters against atomic attacks, and they
put a bomb shelter in the parking lot that you
could walk through. That was their display because there was
such a fear of the Russians attacking us with nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
It was the the.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Height of the Cold War, when everybody was afraid that
Russia was going to launch. And there was the bomb
shelter that you could buy from Sears. That was a
great that great store. And then of course Sears went
under and they went bankrupt, and it was and they
(22:44):
had Craftsmen tools, they had ken More, their own name
in appliances, Craftsmen tools, and they kept selling those off
because Sears couldn't function anymore. All right, So much for
that coming up. A generation of young people have gone
far right. Donald Trump picked up young people. But wait
(23:08):
a minute, young people are left wing. When I was
in college, man, it was communism, it was socialism. I
wanted people to I want a government to pay for
everything I did. What's happened one overriding factor and just
the way the world is going. And I'll come up
with that. And then what was that saying?
Speaker 3 (23:27):
If you're young and conservative, you have no heart. If
you're old and liberal, you have no brain. Yeah, isn't
that the old saying?
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, there's another one. If you're young and hung you
do very well in bars. Do I have that wrong? Oh?
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Okay, sorry, right, okay, let's go ahead and pick up
the right wing and it comprises young people.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
KF I am sixty. You've been listening to.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
The Bill handle the show.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Catch my show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
KFI AM six forty Bill Handle. Here it is a
Wednesday morning, February nineteenth. Some of the stories we're looking
at President Trump President Putin are expected to meet before
the end of the month.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Now, first Amendment case really a good one.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We start with the head of the FCC, newly appointed
head of the SCC, Brendan Carr, and he is well,
let me put it this way. He was on a
Fox show, strangely enough, and he was appointed by the president.
And he announced that the FCC is investigating KCBS San
(00:48):
Francisco AM station over its coverage of the administration's mass
deportation raids in San Jose. And here's what happens, or
here's what happened. You have kcbas read looking at a
raid that is happening in real time and saying, there's
an undercover car over there, here are agents over there,
(01:10):
all of this in real time, and he is arguing
that got in the way of law enforcement. You can't
do that. Of course, First Amendment people are going, wait
a minute, we sure as hell can. What we're doing
is reporting what is happening So that is one issue.
And the other issue, which I think is more fun,
(01:31):
only because I have a personal experience with this, is
there was against CBS. There's a move that's being taken.
This is a civil suit Trump is doing for ten
billion dollars because sixty Minutes in an interview with Kamala
Harris and edited it to look like she was answering
(01:54):
the question one way when she was answering a question
the other way. And he wants ten billion dollars of
interesting to see what damages they are because what happened
as a result. Oh, I don't know. He won. So
where's he going to get his ten billion dollars even
if a jury agrees with him.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yes, KSEBS or CBS.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Wrongly edited the Kamalay Harris interview.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Okay, now what you won?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So case in point because I have some experience with this,
not particularly running for president or winning, but being interviewed
by sixty minutes. And this happened in the early eighties
when sixty Minutes I was doing a doing one of
his segments on surrogacy, and I was a big part
of it because there were two of us on the
planet that were doing surroget parenting law, and so I
(02:46):
was I was a guest. I was featured on sixty
minutes and they ran I don't know, forty seconds of
me saying things and then an interview there. I was
filmed for three hours. That's how long. The interview ran
three hours, and they ran about a minute and a
(03:08):
half of it. And that's simply the way they operate.
And there is no such thing as unbiased. It doesn't exist.
And it's a question of how much bias there is.
You go to Fox, MSNBC, that's biased. You go to Newsmax,
that's crazy bias. It's all biased. And case in point,
(03:29):
let me tell you about a story that broke another
personal story and goes to show you that there is
bias no matter what, and just one word can change
everything much less a series of questions. When I was
doing one of my clients was Tag Romney, who was
Mitt Romney's son in the middle of his run for presidency,
(03:50):
and he was a client of ours and had a
kid with us and was on a second child. And
what we do is we have a ten plate, an
abortion template, an abortion clause in our contract that says
that the surrogate mother will not have an abortion under
(04:11):
these circumstances. Child is anomaloust or whatever has a genetic
disorder such that the child will not have a quality
of life, and the parents make that decision, followed by
a paragraph in font into the world headline saying that
this clause cannot be enforced under Roe v Way, there
is no such thing as enforcing.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
These this clause. Okay, fair enough with that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
The Romneys, who are very conservative Mormons and are not
particularly pro choice. What happened was that to remove that clause,
because that's our general clause.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
It has to be removed manually from my contract.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
And since it was the same surrogate and only the
dates were different, the clause ran in the second tract
that says the parents will decide if.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
The surrogate is to have an abortion. Yeha, okay Romney.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Romney's son just sighed a contract that says he has
the right to abort a child not even carried about
his own wife.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
How controversial is that?
Speaker 2 (05:15):
And this is the run for the presidency that Mitt
Romney was engaged in at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
TMZ picked up that story.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Someone got hold of the contract and sold it to TMZ,
and there it was his signature the abortion clause. Oh
my god, that was going to break wide open. Now
the good news is Harvey Levin is a friend of
mine who I have known, who runs and heads and
created TMZ. I've known him for over thirty five years. Actually,
(05:45):
he was my ethics professor in law school. Now let
me repeat that, the guy who created TMZ was my
ethics professor in law school. In any case, I talked
to him and said, the story has to break. But
here is the difference. One word difference, and that is
(06:06):
I explained to him what happened, that the paralegal just
put in the wrong paragraph and it was a mistake,
and then we crossed it out and did a new contract.
And so here's how that line ran. Bill handle coma
director of the Center for Surrogate Parenting, explains what happens
(06:30):
versus claims what happens? You could use both, because I
made the claim and I explained, And which word do
you think has well I get the benefit of, of course,
the word explained as opposed to I claimed there was
a clerical error.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Kamala Harris was interviewed for Ours.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
And choosing what she says is biased no matter what
you do unless you run all the raw footage. And
that's exactly what Trump wants, by the way, he wants
all the raw footage, and he will see and you
know you have stutters. Oh here's another one. You get
the raw footage, and you have the interviewee going uh
and sort of missing a word, either either a malapropism
(07:21):
or missing the sentence completely, and you know, missing misconstruing.
And that's what's run goes to show you what a
moron she is versus a tight, well conducted answer that
is cogent. You can do anything with that. So anyway,
(07:41):
what's happening is the FCC is going down hard on
KCBS right now and CBS, and it's you know, the
media is biased. By the way, the argument that the
media is biased towards the left I completely agree with.
And that's been going on forever because all the reporters
I've ever met are pretty left wing. Okay, airplane crashes.
(08:07):
Two things that come to mind whenever I say airplane crashes.
One is a look at the number of crashes that
have happened recently. Look at the number of incidents at
airports where there have been collisions or there have been
near collisions up in the air. You have the possibility
of collisions, you know, the planes missing each other by
a few hundred feet. Okay, scarier the hell airplane accidents.
(08:29):
I mean, they're just bound to happen. The other phrase
is flying airplanes is probably the safest way to travel
that's ever been invented. Second is true. First, not so much,
because if you look at the statistics in terms of
airplane debts, they are actually less than the last year
(08:56):
and less than they have been in decades. People just
don't die in airplanes. They don't fall out of the sky.
You don't usually see pilot error, you don't usually see
mechanical problems that cause deaths. It just doesn't happen, did it. Yeah,
it just happened in at Reagan International. We know that
at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, we had that plane
(09:19):
that flipped over and they're trying to figure out what happened.
It maybe came in too hard, don't know. No deaths
in that one, and of course all the deaths occurred
in the at Reagan International Airport. The reality is there
have been years in which no deaths have occurred, not
(09:41):
only in the United States, but all of the world
on scheduled airlines, it still is extraordinarily safe going out
on the road, and driving is far more dangerous statistically.
But even I don't get frightened when I drive on
the road. Do I think what's going to happen if
(10:03):
the plane goes down? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I do, even though I'm very comfortable flying.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
As I've told you many times, George Norry and I
have flown together a few times on the way to
Las Vegas, and we always have George Norri does the
overnight for people that don't know. He does the coast
to coast business with Poltergeist and Martian Anal.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Probes and whatever the hells he does.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
And we always argue about who's going to get Number
One building if the plane goes down, and I always
say he is going to and he always says I'm going.
To The point is I do consider that. I don't
consider that when I'm driving at all. Maybe it's because
a lack of control, maybe because I don't do it
every day. And I think most of us are in
(10:45):
the same position. And some people are scared to death
of flying because of the possibility. Because one of the
things you get in a car accident, you're good chance
you're going to survive or not be injured.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You fall out of the sky.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Ye airplane accident, You're not making it out on that one,
that's for sure. But the reality is it is safe
to fly. It is safer to fly now. So now
what ends up happening. You have these possible mid air
collisions where planes get too close to each other.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Well, that does happen?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Is it because it's being reported now because it's a
much bigger deal now, Yeah, I think that's the case.
By the way, the vast majority of deaths that do occur,
and we're talking in a bad year of a couple
one hundred, are in small planes. They're all in small
planes two three passenger little cessens or occasionally you have
a leered jet or a corporate jet. But those pilots
(11:44):
are pretty good. Plenty of young pilots two three hundred
hours in the air, not even forty hours in the air,
that are flying private planes. Those guys get in a.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Little bit of trouble. But even so, it's so rare.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
So next time you get on an airplane, let me
put it this way, I'm going to make you feel
a little bit better. There are so few deaths that
occur so rarely that I want you to think, when
you get on an airplane, you're due. Okay, statistically it's
(12:18):
about to happen to you. Have a good time, enjoy
your vacation. I want to go back to the fires, because,
as I said earlier, we're going to talk a lot
about the fires and one of the things and this
is Altadan, and we're going to talk about because Altadena
has a whole history of First of all, to say,
many African Americans live there.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
It is not a wealthy area like the Palisades.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
It is going to need more help probably, and rebuilding
all those thousands of homes is no easy.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Trick, and it can't be the traditional way of building.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Hire an architect, you go back to Department of Planning,
Building in Safety for the permits.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
It's just not going to be done. They're looking at alternatives.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
How are we going to do this, Well, let's make
the building process easier, let's make it faster, Let's figure
out some way of financing this.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Another way of doing it is.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Going back to what happened at the turn to the
last century when sears.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
The sears catalog sold homes.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Now it's not a question of listing homes, not a
question of selling them on the open market.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
It was a kit that you bought to build your house.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
For those people that buy model airplane kits for example,
which I did as a kid. Right, you got all
the pieces and you put them together and it took
a little while.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
You know, the glue and in this case was glue.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
But with the kits that you bought to build your home,
it was nails and lumber was all pre cut. I mean,
it was a kit where everything was supplied, the nails,
the screws, the electrical panels, I mean, everything other than
the foundation which had to be poured. And people built
their own homes. And if you think that was a
(14:07):
rare occurrence, they sold one hundred thousand of these homes.
And this was in a day and age where and
it was right out of the Seers catalog. I don't
know if you've ever seen a Sears catalog. It got
to the point where Sears, and this Sears was the
Amazon of its day. It went from a brick and
(14:31):
mortar store to a catalog store. Amazon started as a
catalog store on the internet. So the two have a
lot in common and everything that Amazon is today. Sears,
Roebuck and Company was that in the early nineteen hundreds
(14:52):
through the thirties, and it got to the point where
the Sears Catalog was four hundred pages and they would
be sent out and people would I mean, they couldn't
wait to get it. It was second only to the
Bible in people's homes. They would be used at outhouses
on a nail. The pages, the covers were framed and
(15:13):
put inside people's homes. I mean, it was extraordinary what
that was. And so you're looking back. They're looking back.
People are saying, Okay, do we go back to kit homes?
And they had a lot of them, but and they
had a lot of them, but the design was already there.
That's it. There was no building process other than putting
(15:34):
them together. And what I want to do, I want
to spend a few minutes just talking about the Sears
catalog itself.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
And the homes you could buy in talking about.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
The Altadena fires and rebuilding thousands of homes. New methods,
new ways of doing this simply have to be done.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
And the talk is.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
All about speeding up the process, building permits architectural absolutely,
maybe pre manufacture manufactured.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Homes, No one really knows.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Manufactured homes modernly are the closest thing to what I'm
going to talk about, and that is Sears catalog, the
kit homes that you put together yourself. And I'm going
to digress on the history of this because it's just
great fun when we're talking about it. I'm looking at
(16:33):
the Sears Catalog page of a home, a kit home
that was sent to you or sent to customers. Every nail,
every screw, every panel, every piece of wiring. Of course,
the lumber all sent via kit and it was delivered
on a railroad car and delivered to your house, to
(16:53):
your site. And I'm assuming you had to pour your
own foundation. They didn't ship a foundation. And so I'm
looking looking at a home and this is the Barrington
model home kit small house, one small bedroom, a living room,
not bad, by the way, fifteen by thirteen. Okay, So
(17:17):
let's go back and get into why Sears was doing this.
Because Sears was selling everything under the planet, everything, home goods,
farming equipment, virtually everything, jewelry.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
It started with jewelry, by the way.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
So the Modern Homes catalog was a separate catalog that
sold these kids. Nineteen o eight to nineteen forty is
when the homes were sold. At the beginning of nineteen eight.
The prices ranged from one hundred and seven dollars for
a home. That's thirty five hundred dollars today for a home,
(17:58):
a kit home. It's just ridiculous. Then you had the
highest level at that time with thirty five hundred dollars today.
No one hundred and thirteen one thousand dollars today, and
that was the Saratoga Flush. Toilets were not also included
because they were a luxury, although it did say any
(18:20):
of the houses in this book, this catalog can be
arranged with bathroom for a small additional charge. That was
the nineteen oh eight catalog. So Seares introduced three lines,
the simplex sectional, the Standard Built, the Honor Built, the
simplest sectional, the cheapest two rooms, no bathroom. It was
(18:42):
basically a cottage, a small cottage. However, it did have
ancillary buildings included outhouses, chicken coops, hoghouses were included in
the price. Different kind of clientele. Standard Built was built
for warmer climates because they couldn't retain heat. It was
(19:06):
a little tougher now. The Honor Built was the finest,
and it had cyprusiding, cedar shingles and maple trim that
went for in today's dollars, one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
I mean, it was a different, different world.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Nineteen eighteen, the Magnolia, a ten room Honor built mansion,
sold for fifty one hundred dollars. In this we're talking
nineteen eighteen dollars, about one hundred and one thousand dollars today.
Nineteen thirty nine. The last one, the Winnona Bungalow, the
cheapest model, sold for effectively today sixteen thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
The Malden, the kind of house that puts a.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Lift in your soul, sold for what today would be
fifty six thousand dollars. It's just completely crazy. Handle.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
I was checking this out looking you up because it
fascinates me as well. So apparently they sold over seventy
thousand of these homes between nineteen oh eight and nineteen forty,
and then.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
I show one hundred thousand, but that's okay, okay, roughly,
but okay, they say roughly seventy percent of them are
still standing to this day and that nuts. Yeah, and
they're a catalog home. That is a bit of history
that is extraordinary. But then I was sorry. I had
to be pretty handy to put together a house.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Well, they apparently destroyed Seers destroyed their sales records. No
one knows exactly. But there are these little there's these
little stamped these stamped wood on the unfinished areas like
the attic that apparently that you can tell if they
were one of these houses or not.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Isn't that insane? Yeah, it's just the history of this
is an incredible Sear sold cocaine, Sear sold heroin. No, now,
these were Yeah, these were medical miracles at the time
when you had nothing but quackery there and these were
doctors that produced these quack remedies and Sear sold them.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
I remember when they were when you'd get the Sears
wish book before Christmas and that's what you'd look through.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
You'd look through and that's what you picked.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
My dad worked at Sears when in the seventies doing displays,
design and displays, and so we always got what you know,
stuff from Sears and it was always scratching dent.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
I'm sure I am going.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
To end with a personal memory. I was, uh, what's
Cono doing. It was in the nineteen fifties. I was
just very, very small, and I remember this that in
the Sears parking lot in North Hollywood, they had a
very large Sears. Then we lived a couple of blocks away.
(22:06):
Sears was selling bomb shelters against atomic attacks, and they
put a bomb shelter in the parking lot that you
could walk through. That was their display because there was
such a fear of the Russians attacking us with nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
It was the the.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Height of the Cold War, when everybody was afraid that
Russia was going to launch. And there was the bomb
shelter that you could buy from Sears. That was a
great that great store. And then of course Sears went
under and they went bankrupt, and it was and they
(22:44):
had Craftsmen tools, they had ken More, their own name
in appliances, Craftsmen tools, and they kept selling those off
because Sears couldn't function anymore. All right, So much for
that coming up. A generation of young people have gone
far right. Donald Trump picked up young people. But wait
(23:08):
a minute, young people are left wing. When I was
in college, man, it was communism, it was socialism. I
wanted people to I want a government to pay for
everything I did. What's happened one overriding factor and just
the way the world is going. And I'll come up
with that. And then what was that saying?
Speaker 3 (23:27):
If you're young and conservative, you have no heart. If
you're old and liberal, you have no brain. Yeah, isn't
that the old saying?
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, there's another one. If you're young and hung you
do very well in bars. Do I have that wrong? Oh?
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Okay, sorry, right, okay, let's go ahead and pick up
the right wing and it comprises young people.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
KF I am sixty. You've been listening to.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
The Bill handle the show.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Catch my show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app
The Bill Handel Show News
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