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Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 4, No. 4 - January 27, 2022
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................7
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals.................................5,6
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Partly
Cloudy
72˚/51˚
Saturday
Partly
Cloudy
69˚/49˚
Sunday
Sunny
67˚/50˚
LA Rams and Pepsi Give Back
to the South Bay Community
The Los Angeles Rams partnered with Pepsi’s “Dig In” program to provide fans with free lunch from the iconic restaurant, The Serving Spoon. Photo by Kelly Smiley, courtesy LA Rams.
A Courtroom Hearing You
Wouldn’t Mind Getting
By Kiersten Vannest
Picture a court scene: the defense, the
prosecution, the judge, the jury. Perhaps a
police officer, an attorney, or a full gallery
are in attendance. In this picture, do you see
someone in attendance furiously swiping away
at a machine, listening intently? This is the
court reporter, and it’s secretly one of the most
in-demand jobs on the market.
Stella Cordova, a lifelong El Segundo resident,
captioning is done by trained court reporters
because, as Cordova says, no machine will ever
be able to transcribe with the nuance of a real
person. Large universities use court reporters
Stella Cordova. Photo provided by Stella Cordova.
has been trying to tell the world about
her job for years. “There are different court
reporting schools around the country,” says
Cordova, “and it’s more and more common
now to train online.” Cordova herself didn’t
know about court reporting until she found
herself doing it!
“It’s kind of funny. I went to school in the
seventies, and there was a big gas shortage, and
that’s when they started the carpool thing,” she
says. A friend of hers wanted to go to court
reporting school and asked if Cordova would
carpool with her. Not knowing what she was
getting into, what it would cost, or where it
would go, she agreed. She stayed simply
because she didn’t want any gossip about her
quitting or giving up!
Cordova says it was the hardest four years of
her life getting trained as a court reporter. She
explains how court reporters don’t hear words
in the same way as normal English speakers; in
fact, they practically speak a different language.
Court reporters have to be able to transcribe
every word said in court, which means they
have to intake a lot of information incredibly
quickly. Because of this, court reporters are
trained to hear vowels and consonants instead
of words and sentences by letter.
As the words are spoken, Cordova listens
to the sounds and strokes a stenotype machine
according to what she’s hearing. The machine
is like a typewriter, only it has fewer keys, and
it’s meant to be typed pressing multiple keys at
once. Cordova tells the machine the syllables
she hears, and the machine interprets the syllables
into fully spelled out words.
Being a court reporter has sculpted her into
an excellent listener. So much so that Cordova
says she used to come home and want
absolute silence, a sentiment shared by many
court reporters.
Though the job is called court reporter, this
career can take a professional anywhere in
the world. Near the beginning of her career,
Cordova took her skills to Australia, where she
met her husband. The courts there, she says,
were very different from American courts,
complete with wigs and very formal etiquette.
Court reporter jobs are so in demand that
they transcend the courtroom. Many court
reporters don’t report to a single court and
take jobs privately through attorneys and firms.
Others instead choose to use their skills to
transcribe seminars, classes, or sports. Live
See Stella Cordova, page 7
The Thing About Bruxelles
Article and photos
by Ben & Glinda Shipley
You can tell a lot about a country by
sorting through its stock of public statuary.
Americans tend to favor—and then disfavor—
resolute citizen warriors, preferably
seated on snorting steeds large enough to
support a half-dozen selfie-snapping protesters.
Communist Russia replaced the smug
Romanov boyars with angry, determined
workers, then spread their stone-and-metal
likenesses across eastern Europe like a
kitsch factory on overdrive. Italians can’t
help a fondness for bold, holy conquerors
from a legend of two thousand years ago.
The French love myths of any kind, stolen
or otherwise, while the British vent their
wind-blown imperial ambitions.
In Bruxelles, Belgium, the most celebrated
statue—le Mannequin-Pis—is a two-foothigh
fountain, first reported in 1451, of
a three-year-old urinating into a canal.
Supposedly, his aristocratic father commissioned
the artwork out of gratitude after the
son wandered off and was found relieving
himself. Not that anyone really cares. Every
year, local mobs get drunk on the legendary
Belgian brews and dress the bronze boy
in a gaudy, new outfit without interfering
with the free flow of his miniature stream.
Our own favorite gusher, le Cracheur (the
Spitter), spews a constant stream of disdain
from his wall perch between police headquarters
and one of the oldest gay bars in
Bruxelles. Here again, no one seems to know
or care why he was carved, although his
birthdate is fixed at 1704. Yet, when you
See Travel, page 7