Bearers of Sad Tidings Plead for Social Change

The five panelists were, each of them reiterated, the bearers of bad news--stories of murder, rape, child molestation and abduction, alcoholism and drug abuse. Not the sort of presentation, supposedly, that would go down well in competition with lighter topics on how to buy a home, cultivate good business manners and lose weight.

But with the bad news came emotional, sometimes tearful pleas for action along with expressions of hope, and an estimated 2,000 taut-faced women attending state Sen. William Campbell’s Conference on Women Monday responded with their own tears and, finally, long and enthusiastic applause.

The panel of speakers--Candy Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers; Susan Newman, representing the Scott Newman Foundation; Patty Bradbury, mother of the celebrated missing child Laura Bradbury; John Walsh, founder of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, and Doris Tate, mother of murdered actress Sharon Tate and director of the Los Angeles chapter of Parents of Murdered Children--had been scheduled to address the topic “One Person Makes a Difference” in recognition of their individual, often solitary battles for social reform.

High Emotion

The panel--which did not take questions--was scheduled to be presented twice during the afternoon, in consecutive hourlong segments. But the panelists’ high emotions and the audience’s reactions were strong enough to prompt the moderator, Orange County Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks, to declare that the impassioned speeches would continue without a break into the second hour.

Lightner, the first speaker, said that neither she nor MADD, formed after her daughter was killed in an alcohol-related auto accident in 1980, were taken seriously during the organization’s early days.

“I was a victim, I was mad and I wanted to change the system,” she said, but “I found out that it’s a man’s world. The media at first focused on the fact that I was a woman.”

The drunk drivers, the police who arrest them, the judges who try them and the legislators who make the laws that govern them were, she found, nearly always men and not inclined to turn a sympathetic ear to a crusading homemaker.

But usually, she said, “the women are the victims and the survivors” in alcohol-related traffic deaths.

In the face of indifference and opposition, Lightner said she had to learn quickly how to be a political street fighter.

“I used to be apolitical,” she said. “I wasn’t a registered voter, and I didn’t know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat.”

With the growth of her organization, however, “MADD became my most demanding child. Grass-roots lobbying isn’t easy. If someone asked me today about doing grass-roots lobbying, I’d say, ‘Don’t.’ It was something I could never repeat and something I would never want to repeat.”

Worth the Sacrifices

Although MADD has kept her away from home and a more conventional family life, Lightner said “it was worth it. I feel proud that so many women who were ‘just housewives’ have done things they never thought they could do.”

Susan Newman, while voicing her own strong opinions on the media’s “inaccurate presentation” of the consequences of drug use, in large measure represented her family. She is the daughter of actor Paul Newman and actress Joanne Woodward and the sister of Scott Newman, who died of a drug overdose in 1978 at age 28. As a result of the death, the Newman family established the Scott Newman Foundation for treatment and prevention of drug abuse among young people.

As a member of a family accustomed to media attention, Newman said that when she began looking for the biggest negative influence on young people who are deciding whether to use drugs, the culprit was nearly at the Newman front door.

“The media,” she said, “is the greatest influence on our behavior. Some children’s first words are, ‘This Bud’s for you.’ ”

Drug Messages

An impressionable school-age child, she said, can awaken to a clock radio blaring, “Wake up, you party animals, it’s going to be quite a weekend. . . . If you remember it, call me on Monday.”

Children, she added, can then hear of the newest celebrity to check into a drug or alcohol rehabilitation clinic, can see cigarette and tobacco ads in mainstream national magazines, can witness dope deals being consummated at and around school during the day, can stop at the drugstore on the way home and pick up a copy of the drug-oriented High Times magazine, and finally “turn on cable at home and see Madonna getting stoned in ‘Desperately Seeking Susan.’ ”

The mass media, said Newman, offer a dazzling array of artificial mood alterers.

“They’re saying the solution is, pop it, dissolve it, drink it, suck on it, but here it is,” she said.

At the very core of the problem, Newman said, is not simply media influence, but what she called apathy and hypocrisy.

“I became angry at the apathy in the entertainment community” toward media portrayal of drug abuse “and the anger grew and grew until I couldn’t bear to stay away (from the problem). Rightly or wrongly, people do listen to the Newman family.”

And “there’s still a tremendous amount of hypocrisy surrounding substance-related issues,” typified, she said, by instances in which a mother may say to a child, “just this once, you can have half of mommy’s Valium.”

Perhaps the most emotional speaker on the panel was Patty Bradbury of Huntington Beach.

The mother of Laura Bradbury, who disappeared on a family camping trip in 1984 and has since become the catalyst for greater awareness of the plight of abducted children, she appeared near tears several times during her impromptu speech.

In the last two years, she said, “I’ve found out a lot of things that I never wanted to know,” including information about organizations dedicated to having sex with young children.

Support Group

“We found that people don’t take care of you automatically. There isn’t a law-enforcement agency that’s going to sweep you up in its arms and say, ‘We’ll find your child.’ You darn well better get out there and do it yourself.”

As a result of Laura’s disappearance, said Bradbury, a “core group” of 10 family members and friends established what Bradbury called a national network in an attempt to find her.

“We were swept into a totally different life style,” she said. “We faced this as you would face a campaign.”

Because of increased awareness of the problem of child abduction, she said, 12 out of 25 of the missing children whose faces have appeared on milk cartons and grocery bags in California have been found.

Telling children of the dangers of abduction, she added, also is necessary.

“If we train our children properly,” said Bradbury, “we will not scare them, we’ll prepare them.”

John Walsh, whose son Adam was abducted and murdered in 1981 (and who later became the subject of a television movie about the incident), begged the audience to send letters to legislators to appeal for passage of a bill that would establish a statewide clearinghouse for information about missing children. The information would routinely be entered into the FBI’s National Crime Information Computer.

The bill, AB 2916, is, he said, currently being considered by the state Assembly.

Like Lightner, Walsh said he has “been in the arena for 4 1/2 years, battling men. If this (abduction) would have happened to men instead of just women and children, this would have been solved long ago.”

Many law enforcement agencies, he said, do not give a report of a missing child “the same dignity as a stolen-car report. What gives them the right . . . in some cases to sign the death warrant of your child?”

In the case of Doris Tate’s daughter, the report of her death was given worldwide attention. Sharon Tate was one of the victims of the Tate-LaBianca murders committed in 1969 by members of the Manson family. Today Doris Tate is the director of the Los Angeles chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a national support group for families of homicide victims.

‘Unbelievable Depression’

Her memories of “unbelievable depression” following the crime are still sharp, she said.

She responded to a signature campaign in 1981, urging parole for convicted Manson family killer Leslie Van Houten by obtaining more than 300,000 letters demanding that the Tate-LaBianca murderers remain in prison.

“I get sick and tired of looking at those people (the killers),” she said, to loud applause. “Sharon was convicted without a judge or jury and our family was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Why shouldn’t the killers get the same?”

Tate said Parents of Murdered Children is “making progress, but it’s slow. There’s so much trauma to overcome. But I’m so impressed with the number of people interested in what we’re doing.”