The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 22

Goals Make Middle Years Bonus Years Cos Anfidcs Simc IEW PART IV THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 1975 lllllt: mm ii 1 1 mmm BY LORRAINE BENNETT TimM SUII Writer ANAHEIM Are middle-aged people living without goals? The question first came to Mildred Tengbom while she was sitting in a psychology class at Cypress College. The students had split into groups to discuss different periods of life childhood, adolescence, middle age and retirement Students assigned to research the middle age visited friends and neighbors whose children had left home and asked about their goals for the remainder of their lives. Some shrugged. Some returned the question with a blank stare. Some reacted as if such a thought never had occurred to them.

Others said they planned to do a lot of camping and fishing. "Actually, most of them had no goals," Mrs. Tengbom recalls. "The students couldnt get over that. They said, 'Why, they're still young.

They've lived almost entirely for their children and now their children are gone.1 The students felt no child is worthy of the lifetime of two individuals." Mildred Tengbom couldn't forget that It haunted her as she drove home. She was facing the middle years. She had four teen-aged children. "I thought, 'But it just can't be true. Are we really living without goals? Researching the Topic She began to research this topic She met with groups of people in their middle years.

She consulted doctors. She sent questionnaires to friends across the country, with extra copies for them to give other friends. She read. Then she began writing. That was two years ago.

Now she has a book called "The Bonus Years." (Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis) The book itself is not exhaustive, but it contains some guidelines for self-assessment and setting goals. At the end of each chapter it lists references to publications by experts on the topics discussed. The topics are touchy. They deal with chronic complain-ers who believe their health is failing and tell everybody about it, marriage problems in the middle years, letting go of children, caring for aging parents and the twin searches for security and adventure that can cause great personal conflict during this time. Mrs.

Tengbom is the wife of a Lutheran minister and her book, like much of her writing, draws from religious perspectives. But she believes the guidelines can be applied from a secular standpoint as well. "I really would like to appeal to people with no church background," she says. She defines the middle years as the time period when family responsibilities begin to ease and before retirement. "Retirement is a whole different thing," she points out.

"But if one has made realistic plans for retirement during the middle years, it shouldn't be a problem." Mrs. Tengbom spoke from the den of her comfortable Anaheim home. Ebony carvings from Africa and other "So people in their middle years tend to look back," she said. They tend to reevaluate their life up to this point. They can't help but ask, 'Has it been worth it? This reevaluation period can be a renewing, helpful experience.

But more often, it brings on a crisis. The highest incidence of divorce comes first among young teen-agers, and second, among those who have been married for 20 to 30 years, she said. The middle years usually are a time of great tension in a career as well. It is during this time that many persons undergo the anxiety of wondering whether they will be "farmed out" early or lose out to younger colleagues breathing down their necks," she explained. "Also, people are living longer now, and that means there can be a problem with aging parents.

Many people are concerned with their parents on the one hand and their growing children on the other." Sometimes this is the time when unhappy offspring bring their own children home to grandparents. "An attorney friend told me that a young divorced girl should consider herself lucky if she gets child support or alimony for two years," Mrs. Tengbom said. "So what is she going to do? A girl often will turn to her middle-aged parents because she has nowhere to go. "And grandmother might find herself caring for a young child all over again while the mother works.

This may come at a time when grandmother had begun to consider, now that her children were gone, that she might like to go to work herself." Few People Are Disabled Never before has there been such a long time span defined as "middle years," said Mrs. Tengbom. "This is due to two things better health and smaller families." But as the aging process continues "sooner or later you will have a (health) problem that doesn't go away," she warned. "Then, if you can create a good attitude toward your physical ailment, you can live above it" She devotes a chapter to health problems and warning signals with the admonition that "if we are going to be able to fulfill the goals we set for our second half of life, we are going to need as good health as possible." If people reach middle age of 50 without major complaints, chances for the remaining third of life are very, very good, she says, citing doctors to back up her claim. "I've talked with doctors and they tell me that only about 5 of those in the middle years are really disabled," she said.

With good health, the middle years can be the happiest and best years of life, Mrs. Tengbom states. But if problems seem insurmountable, there are resources for coping with them. i "Even though people may not be church-affiliated, they1 can always call the office of a large church for referral to reliable help; "They could go to any state-sponsored counseling office, or to a family doctor they can trust. "More doctors are becoming willing to help their patients in this manner Please Turn (o Page 8, CoL 2 CRITIC AT LARGE Captured by KGRB BY CHARLES CHAMPUN Timtft Entertainment Editor 1 Los Angeles radio is still thin on top, where more classical music ought to be, on either AM or FM, but otherwise the diversity of sounds that come spilling out of the dashboard during our downtime on the freeways is ear-blowing.

Many months ago, wandering idly over the kilocycles, I. almost kissed a guardrail when a muffled and scratchy 1929 recording of "Old Man River" by Duke Ellington sparked in somewhere between rock and Spanish-language roll. It was followed by an even older Paul Whiteman side with an unmistakable cornet chorus, imaginative and elegant, by Bix Beiderbecke himself. A while later I was hearing, in pleased disbelief, the original Dorsey 'Song of India" with Bunny Berigan's hard-driving trumpet solo, and then Berigan's "I Can't Get Started," which seems to turn up every other day at least. I had been captured (and I am not alone, it turns out) by KGRB, operating at 900 on the AM dial from sunrise to sunset out of Covina in "the beautiful San Gabriel Valley." I've never been out to see the station and I think I won't go.

It might well spoil some mental pictures that are as vivid as the ones I used to have of Fibber Magee's closet and Jack Benny's Maxwell and the powerful little five-watter down wherever that ramshackle station was back when radio wasn't ramshackle. You have the impression of an untidy den with the floor and every other level surface piled high with dusty and random stacks of old 78s, and the disc jockey of the moment rifling through on his daily impulse-of-the-moment stroll down memory lane. The daytime announcers are Rex Moore, who sounds as if he could not possibly have been born when even the most recent of the sides were recorded, and Rahn Harris, who on the other hand sounds as if he had heard them all the first time they went around. Not quite all, because the KGRB library, or its borrowings, seems astonishingly to go all the way back to the very early '20s of King Oliver and the young Bessie Smith. Anything cut any later than the 1950s almost always proves to be a re-creation of one or another of the classic big band sides, or once in a while, as on Wednesday morning, cuts from a reunion session of the Benny Goodman quartet (Gene Krupa, Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson) recorded in 1964.

LOOKING AHEAD Mildred Tengbom, former missionary and author of book on middle-aged, shows several artifacts she collected in Africa. Times photo by Cliff Otto artifacts collected during the years the Tengboms were missionaries lined a double bookcase behind her. She spoke casually, with the assurance of one accustomed to counseling or speaking before groups, addressing topics close to her as easily as if she were discussing the weather. A copy of her book, in its paperback cover, lay on her lap. She turned the pages slowly, giving capsule descriptions of each chapter.

It took two years to research and write the book. "You know, people in their middle years go through something similar to adolescence," she said. Short brown curly hair and black-rimmed glasses enhanced an open, alert face. She talked rapidly, as if she had been over the topics times. "Usually, as we move along in life, we look ahead.

If we don't look to the future, we lose hope. But in our middle years, the future is disturbing." People don't like to think of the decaying body that accompanies old age, or the ending of a lifetime career that signals retirement, she added. DANCE REVIEW L.A. Ballet's Small Leap Forward 1111 1 In 1966, the natural ethnic ritual of Les Ballets Africains had to be cloaked in anachronistic brassieres at the same theater. Now, in a self-conscious little shlock exercise labeled "La Creation du Monde," everything hangs out Tem-nns fuffit.

BY MARTIN BERNHEIMER Times Music Critic Contrary to what the boosters scream, the Los Angeles Ballet, which opened an ambitious miniseason at the Huntington Hartford Wednesday, is not ready to hold up its collective feet amid the toughest terpsichorean competi-tioa But it is an admirable company, populated with at-. tractive young dancers and propelled with high commitment and spirits to match. John Clifford's 26-body troupe has taken some laudable leaps forward in the year since I last saw it The corps of gawky-girl students seems to have The concern for watered-down Balanchine seems to have abated. The guest-star syndrome has been quelled. The roster has been augmented with a well-balanced selection of remarkably strong new dancers, some of whom mirabile dicta happen to be male.

Progress definitely is being made. But one superproblem lingers. Los Angeles Ballet needs, demands, deserves, bet- ter choreography. Personal Prowess No one can deny the importance of Clifford's contribution to our balletic desert. No one can belittle his dedication, his positive influence, his personal prowess as a flying imp, his boldness in forswearing the security of New York for local perils.

None of this, unfortunately, makes him a choreographer of taste, of imagination, restraint or style. For better or worse, Los Angeles Ballet is a company created in the Clifford choreographic image. And on the basis of the all-Clifford program sampled Wednesday, this would seem to be for worse. Clifford knows how to manipulate engaging patterns and, like his New York City Ballet mentor, he is intent on letting his dancers reflect individual personalities. Neat rows of pretty puppets obviously do not interest him.

Fine. What does seem to interest him, unfortunately, is the easy effect His ballets remain stubbornly addicted to cutesiness, to the fashionably mod and to shreds and Nakedness is, of course, nice, and since the protagonists here are called Adam and Eve, there even is reasonable justification for it Ultimately, however absence of costuming cannot save a bad ballet any more then the presence of lavish costuming can. Clifford poses muscular Ken Mraz and willowy Marilee Stiles (both of whom look better with their clothes on) in innocent shadows. All is calm and kitschy. Then he introduces Steven Wistrich as a dapper, sexually versatile song-and-dance snake who does suggestive things with the apple.

Soon the lounging lovers are sporting underwear and yapping at each other over the morning coffee. So much for original sin. I suppose it is supposed to be funny, but Clifford manages to make it all look vapid and vulgar, and he rapes Milhaud's wonderful score (the piano-quintet version) in the process. Amiable Abstraction "Kammermusik set to Hindemith via tape, turned out to be far less tawdry (what could be more even mildly engrossing. It is an amiable abstraction in red and white, a neat vehicle for Catherine Prescott and Kipling Houston, and a sassy second-hand conglomeration of Balanchine classicism and Robbins flamboyance with ornamental dabs of jazz, whimsy, satire, and circus.

The revivals on the program, both dating way back to November, 1974, included "Les Aimants" (to Debussy with love) and "The Red Back Book" (to Scott Joplin without). The former offers a rather pretentious series of pas de deux fn a variety of erotic moods and combinations. One couldnt tell the players even with a program, but the lyri- cal intertwining of cliches was, for the most part, beautifully managed. Please Turn to Page 15. Col.

2 The re-creations are sometimes a freeway guessing gameis it in fact the original or a copy? Even through the limited resources of a car speaker, and a signal which tires fast west of Sepulveda and whispers through underpasses, the richer sound of the re-creations is usually the giveaway, even when the tone-for-tone and note-for-note reproduction of the choruses is faultless. The president and general manager of KGRB (and its six in the morning until midnight sister, KBOB-FM at 98.3, which I havent been able to detect on the Westside). is Robert Burdette. He comes by his format logically, it seems clear, because in his earlier career as an audio engineer he used to handle ballroom remotes for Tommy Dorsey and other big bands. Today, for anybody who wafted into music on those late-night remotes from the Trianon, the Blackhawk Inn, the Log Cabin at Armonk, Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook (on the Newark-Pompton Turnpike), the Glen Island Casino, the Cafe Rouge of the Hotel Pennsylvania and all the others, or who saved up to buy those heavy and all too breakable 78s, a commuter-hour listen to KGRB becomes an extraordinary suspension in time.

I have had the eerie feeling that what it was was an unaccountably delayed rebroadcast for the West Coast, turning up like one of those letters posted in 1921 and delivered only yesterday. At a reception the other night for the Canadian Film Board delegation to Filmex, Donald H. Gilchrist, the new Canadian consul-general in town, identified himself as a big band buff (with a signed photograph of the Bob Crosby band in its Ray Bauduc days proudly hanging in the den). I started to tell him about KGRB. No need; he had found it long since.

Occasionally the KGRB men, plunging headlong into a commercial for one of the Valley restaurants or brake shops, forget to identify a side. More often Harris particularly, as one aficionado talking to an audience of others, gives not only the recording date but reads off the personnel and draws on his own familiarity with those different times. Inevitably the air-plays remind you of the whole truth about the big band era. Not all the bands were big or remotely imaginative, and the standard arrangements were dismally stereotyped and boring. Even the good bands filled out their books with charts that were ricky-ticky and tacky.

But the sweet-swing doldrums last a tight 2:30 and Eddie Condon's All-Stars will leap in to shake the dashboard with memories of another straia ADAM AND EVE Ken Mraz and Marilee Stiles dance "La Creation du Monde" with L.A. Ballet. Times photo by Marianna Diamos patches borrowed an alarming variety of popular sources. Clifford tends to trivialize even the most serious musical impulse, and his movement vocabulary is' the sort of thing that could give eclecticism a bad name. Last year he gave us a nasty little rock ballet Later this he promises a dancing sitar concerto.

For his opening-night would-be sensation, he volunteered some hippe-ty-hop nudity. Oh, dear. Have You Heard the One About George Burns? THE VIEWS INSIDE BY MARY MURPHY Times Staff Writer George Burns sat in a blue bathrobe, eating poached eggs, chicken soup, onion matzos and carrying on lively conversation with his 25ish-year-old girlfriend. Burns is the star of the film version of "The Sunshine Boys," Neil Simon's homage to the heyday of vaudeville and appreciation of pains and pleasures of growing old. Selecting him as an aging vaudevillian is a case of typecasting carried to perfection.

Burns on Burns, the oldest vaudevillian extant Born in 1896. retired from vaudeville in 1931. retired M4i wt3tf r' yTir 1 ZLm BOOKS: Victor Canning's "The Mask of Memory" by Robert Kirsch on Page 8. MOVIES: "Evil of Dracula" by Linda Gross on Page 1 4. MUSIC: Sour Cream at Royce Hall by Daniel Cariaga on Page 16.

John B. Williams and Expectations at the Times restaurant by Leonard Feather on Page Santana at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium by Dennis Hunt on Page 1 5. TELEVISION: "The Confessions of Dick Van Dyke" by Gregg Kilday on Page 20. "Crime Club" by Kevin Thomas on Page 20. from movies in 1939, Burns is the hottest property at MGM these days.

"I made my last picture ('Honolulu') at this studio 36 years ago. They liked me so much they asked me back," says Burns. The first of a string of jokes that, like the man, are wry, shrewd and marked by self-awareness. Burns is the reigning idol on Stage 26 he memorized the entire' script before production started, he is always on time, never temperamental and never flubs a line unless he's tired. "Looking at him you think he can't make it down the steps by himself, but he knows exactly what he'3 doing.

He is an old trouper and a funny, funny man," said a crew member. Please Turn to Page 13, Col. 1 AND OTHER FEATURES Dear Abby. 6 Joyce Haber Page 12 Bridge Page 3 Movie Call Sheet. Page 15 Art Buchwald 2 On Fashion Page 7 Comics Pago 1 0 On View.

Page 3 Family Guide Page 4 Stage Notes. Page 1 6 Television Pages 1 7, 1 8. 20 GIVE 'EM AN OLD SOFT SHOE It's been 44 the way he carries it off at MGM's Stage 26, years since comedian George Burns, right, shuffled where he and Walter Matthau, left, play "The off the vaudeville stage, but you wouldn't know it Sunshine Boys," a couple of aging yaundevillians. Tim photo.