‘SPARKS’ OFF THE ROTARY WHEEL An Award-Winning Newsletter

The Rotary Club of Altadena meets Thursdays at noon at the Altadena Town and Country Club

Rotary Club of Altadena - #772 Chartered: February 14, 1949, P.O. Box 414, Altadena, CA 91003 RI Pres: Holger Knaack, Dist. 5300 Gov: Greg Jones

*** Calendar Update: July 1 is DARK, July 8 is CLUB ASSEMBLY ***

THIS WEEK via ZOOM: Mark and Jenny Blatty Speaker Chair for April: Craig Cox APRIL 15, 2021 Mark and Jenny Blatty founded Officers Byron Blatty Wines in 2014 after a President: David Smith visit to Napa Valley. Inspired by Cell: 626-826-2193 the story of Napa’s original President Elect: Frank Cunningham vintners, who challenged the Treasurer: Mike Noll French with their determination to Bus: 626-657-2287 create world-class wines in a Secretary: James Gorton previously unproven region, the Bus: 626-793-6215 Blattys had only one rule that VP: Mark Mariscal would guide them on their Cell: 323-816-6713 endeavor to start a commercial winery: The wines had to be from their Directors Doug Colliflower hometown of Los Angeles. Initially they intended to plant a small vineyard on Maria Perez-Arton their hillside property, but soon realized that the space was not large enough, Sylvia Vega nor was it right for the varietals they had in mind. Undeterred, they began to Sarah O’Brien search for vineyards in LA County from which to source their grapes. Despite Dawn Smith the area's rich wine history, established vineyards in LA are few and far between, and it took the couple nearly a year to discover just the right sites, Chairs tucked away in the far corners of the county. Membership: Maria Perez-Arton International: Sarah O’Brien The couple is hands on in every element of the business, including the Community Service: Doug Colliflower winemaking in which Mark plays a major role, with everything from vineyard Vocational: Steve Kerekes management, to barrel selection, to blending. Together Mark and Jenny Youth Contests, Scholarships, Awards: oversee the overall brand development, wine club management, events, Mike Zoeller marketing, and sales for the winery. In addition to being vintners, the Blattys Youth Activities: Tony Hill also have careers in television. Mark is a Los Angeles native, and Jenny Foundation: Steve relocated from Chicago in 2001. Their first child, Oliver Byron Blatty, was born in January 2017. ZOOM INFO: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84589196187?pwd=cE9Pa3hnL2ZwMjFyTW5 LN2sreXdIdz09

Meeting ID: 845 8919 6187 Passcode: 768576 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbItadr6xg ______

LAST WEEK: Marissa Peden, Director of Strategic https://www.ecsforseniors.org/montecedro/

Partnerships - Dressember Foundation SUMMER CONCERT Program Chair: Craig Cox Program Write-Up: Roger Fennell SERIES: Contact Doug if you can help with sponsorship or know others who might be interested!

Our guest today was Marissa of Dressember.org. She is a social impact professional and member of the gender-based rights organization, Dressember.org, whose motto is "Where all people are free". The organization works with people who are trapped in forced labor, child labor, debt bondage, and sex trafficking. Contraband items can be trafficked once whereas human beings can be trafficked multiple times. 11% of those who are trafficked are of the median age of 11; 9% are as young as three years. The trafficking occurs The Dressember organization was on the Dark Web. This is the immortal story of Cosette in "Les Miserables". launched in 2013. By 2016 it had raised 1.0 M dollars. By 2019 it had raised 10M dollars. In California it cares for foster-care children, LGBTQ, people, run-aways and children in hotels and Casinos. President David’s Words of ______Wisdom… and more!

FROM UNDER THE SHADE Lucky Yamaguchi: The Man That Survived Two Atomic Bombs By President David Smith

A month back I cut and pasted an article on Violet Jessop, the woman that survived the sinking of the “I wish you the best even if you wish Titanic, Britannic and collision of the Olympic. I was me the opposite; sooner or later we’ll telling my brother the tale of Violet Jessop when he told me about Lucky all see who the prophet is.” Yamaguchi. Somehow part of me thinks calling him Lucky Yamaguchi could be (Unknown) repugnant but he really was lucky. In the aftermath of the atom bomb I would have thought that transportation in would have been so crippled that one person would have been able to travel to in time to be bombed This Day in History (8 April) again. Apparently it’s believed that 165 people may have, but Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognized as surviving both. Some 563 AD: Buddhists celebrate the 260,000 people survived the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki birth of Gautama Buddha. His during World War II, but Japanese engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of teachings were passed down orally the very few who endured the horror of both blasts and lived to tell the tale. for some 400 years before someone wrote them down. Talk about a slow server. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to leave Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell. The 1911: Dutch physicist Heike 29-year-old naval engineer was on a Kamerlingh Onnes discovered three-month-long business trip for his employer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and superconductivity. August 6, 1945, was supposed to be his last day in the city. He and his colleagues had Superconductivity is a set of spent the summer working long hours on the physical properties observed when design for a new oil tanker, and he was certain materials are cooled to looking forward to finally returning home to his wife, Hisako, and their infant son, Katsutoshi. near absolute zero. Electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic Around 8:15 that morning, Yamaguchi was flux fields are expelled from the walking to Mitsubishi’s shipyard for the final time when he heard the drone of material. Any material exhibiting an aircraft overhead. Looking skyward, he saw an American B-29 bomber soar these properties is a over the city and drop a small object connected to a parachute. Suddenly, the superconductor. sky erupted in a blaze of light, which Yamaguchi later described as resembling the “the lightning of a huge magnesium flare.” He had just enough time to dive into a ditch before an ear-splitting boom rang out. The shock wave that The other day accompanied it sucked Yamaguchi from the ground, spun him in the air like a Steve Kerekes tornado and sent him hurtling into a nearby potato patch. He’d been less than called me a Zero; two miles from ground zero. I lashed back and called him an “I didn’t know what had happened,” he later told the British newspaper The Absolute Zero. Times. “I think I fainted for a while. When I opened my eyes, everything was dark, and I couldn’t see much. It was like the start of a film at the cinema, before the picture has begun when the blank frames are just flashing up 1513: Explorer Juan Ponce de without any sound.” The atomic blast had kicked up enough dust and debris to Loen declares Florida a territory of nearly blot out the morning sun. Yamaguchi was surrounded by torrents of Spain. I’ll give you that, they do falling ash, and he could see a mushroom cloud of fire rising in the sky over speak a lot of Spanish down there, Hiroshima. His face and forearms had been badly burned, and both his especially the closer you get to eardrums were ruptured. Miami. Yamaguchi wandered in a daze toward what remained of the Mitsubishi shipyard. There, he found his coworkers Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, 1820: The Venus de Milo is both of whom had survived the blast. After spending a restless night in an air discovered on the Aegean island of raid shelter, the men awoke on August 7 and made their way toward the train Melos. Not sure why that was station, which they had heard was somehow still operating. The journey took them through a nightmarish landscape of still-flickering fires, shattered worth mentioning. buildings and charred and melted corpses lining the streets. Many of the city’s bridges had been turned into twisted wreckage, and at one river crossing, 1904: Long Acre Square in Yamaguchi was forced to swim through a layer of floating dead bodies. Upon Manhattan, New York, was reaching the station, he boarded a train full of burned and bewildered renamed Time Square. passengers and settled in for the overnight ride to his hometown of Nagasaki. 1974: France, Pablo Picasso passed Yamaguchi arrived in Nagasaki early in the morning on August 8 and limped to away. He was 91 years old. the hospital. The doctor who treated him was a former school classmate, but the blackened burns on Yamaguchi’s hands and face were so severe the man didn’t recognize him at first. Neither did his family. When he returned home 1974: Hank Aaron of the Atlanta afterwards, feverish and swaddled in bandages, his mother accused him of Braves hits his 715th career home being a ghost. run breaking Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers. Despite being on the verge of collapse, Yamaguchi dragged himself out of bed on the morning of August 9 and reported for work at Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki 1986: Clint Eastwood is elected office. Around 11 a.m., he found himself in a meeting with a company director who demanded a full report on Hiroshima. The engineer recounted the mayor of Carmel. scattered events of August 6—the blinding light, the deafening boom—but his superior accused him of being mad. How could a single bomb destroy an entire city? Yamaguchi was trying to explain himself when the landscape outside suddenly exploded with another iridescent white flash. Yamaguchi dropped to the ground just seconds before the shock wave shattered the office windows and sent broken glass and debris careening through the room. “I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he later told the newspaper .

The atom bomb that hit Nagasaki was even more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, but as Yamaguchi would later learn, the city’s hilly landscape and a reinforced stairwell had combined to muffle the blast inside the office. His bandages were blown off, and he was hit by yet another surge of cancer-causing radiation, but he emerged relatively unhurt. For the second time in three days, he’d had the misfortune of being within two miles of a The Hiroshima Chamber of Industry and nuclear explosion. For the second time, he’d been fortunate enough to survive. Commerce was the only building remotely close to standing near the center of the After fleeing from the skeleton of the Mitsubishi building, Yamaguchi rushed atomic bomb blast of August 6, 1945. It through a bomb-ravaged Nagasaki to check on his wife and son. He feared the was left unrepaired as a reminder of the worst when he saw a section of his house had been reduced to rubble, but he event. soon found both had sustained only superficial injuries. His wife had been out looking for burn ointment for her husband, and when the explosion came, she and the baby had taken refuge in a tunnel. It was yet another strange twist of fate. If Yamaguchi hadn’t been hurt at Hiroshima, his family might have been killed at Nagasaki.

In the days the followed, Yamaguchi’s double-dose of radiation took its toll. His hair fell out, the wounds on his arms turned gangrenous, and he began vomiting incessantly. He was still languishing in a bomb shelter with his family on August 15, when ’s Emperor Hirohito announced the country’s surrender in a radio broadcast. “I had no feeling about it,” Yamaguchi later told . “I was neither sorry nor glad. I was seriously ill with a fever, eating almost nothing, hardly even drinking. I thought that I was about to cross to the The reinforced concrete buildings of the Nagasaki Medical College hospital were other side.” among the only ones that remained standing after the U.S. dropped its second Yet unlike so many victims of radiation exposure, Yamaguchi slowly recovered atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. The and went on to live a relatively normal life. He served as a translator for the hospital was located 800 meters from U.S. armed forces during their , and later taught school ground zero of the atomic bomb explosion. before resuming his engineering career at Mitsubishi. He and his wife even had two more children in the 1950s, both of them girls. Yamaguchi dealt with the ______horrific memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by writing poetry, but he avoided discussing his experiences publicly until the 2000s, when he released a Check your email for memoir and became part of the anti-atomic weapons movement. He later Club Invoices! journeyed to New York in 2006 and spoke about before the . “Having experienced atomic bombings twice and survived, it is my destiny to talk about it,” he said in his speech.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi wasn’t the only person to endure two atomic blasts. His coworkers Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato were also in Nagasaki when the second bomb fell, as was Shigeyoshi Morimoto, a kite maker who had miraculously survived Hiroshima despite being only a half-mile from ground zero. All told, some 165 people may have experienced both attacks, yet Yamaguchi was the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as a “nijyuu ,” or “twice-bombed person.” He finally won the distinction in 2009, only a year before he died at the age of 93. 2021 Rotary International Convention (virtual) https://convention.rotary.org/en/taipei