Robert Garcia’s early childhood experiences showed him that with hard work and determination, you can accomplish anything. While busy serving as a college administrator and working on his doctorate degree, a year ago he somehow found the time to co-found LBPOST.com, a daily Internet news service covering Long Beach events and people.

“The articles in LBPOST are written by community activists and business people,” he says. “We all have one thing in common: We all love Long Beach.”

Garcia came to the U.S. from Peru when he was 4 years old. “My mother was a single mom who worked two jobs and always pushed me to do my best and not take any opportunity for granted,” he says. “Going through the long process of becoming a U.S. citizen also made me who I am by giving me a deep love for America, causing me to believe in the American dream, and giving me the drive to work hard to attain it.”

Last month, Garcia and his business partner Shaun Lunachi launched a second Internet publication, LBPOSTSPORTS.com. “The goal of both entities is to get information to the people about what is really going on in Long Beach,” Garcia says, “so they can make decisions on what they want, and what directions our city should take.”

Noting that innovative thinking is a natural product of attitude and effort, Garcia adds, “If you have a desire to help others and you work hard, you will do very well.”




Available. That’s the word Ryan Smolar and Rachel Potucek, of the urban-design firm Smolarcorp, use to describe themselves. Available to new ideas. Available to see things in a different manner. And available to work for change. A young dynamic duo, Smolar met Potucek after he was introduced to the City by three people: Ron Petke (Charter Communications), Don Jergler (Press-Telegram), and John Morris (Pine Avenue maven). “This holy trinity of Long Beachians opened up this wonderful city to me,” Smolar said.

Potucek, a former staffer for Long Beach City Councilmember Suja Lowenthal, joined forces with Smolar to create University by the Sea. “We constantly strive to find new ways to ask more of ourselves, to raise our expectations,” Potucek said. “Community development requires lots of imagination backed by hard work and ethical decision-making.”

“I think what makes Long Beach so special are its people, its places,” said Smolar, “and all of the connections in-between.”

Smolar and Potucek are focusing their energy on downtown Long Beach with projects like University by the Sea and Limelight Long Beach (a new comprehensive online events calendar). But their long-term goal is to introduce more partnerships between downtown, north and east Long Beach.




It takes extraordinary leadership, vision, and talent to make urban mass transit seem cool and cutting edge. Back in the mid-1970s, LB Transit was moribund, limping along with 100 or so dilapidated buses and about 300 employees.

In 1975, not long after a life-shaping tour in Vietnam with the U.S. Marine Corps, Larry Jackson was hired by the City of Long Beach as a transportation consultant. Armed with degrees in economics and financial management from Michigan State University (he was raised on the state’s upper peninsula), Jackson hit the career-path accelerator. Named the system’s president and CEO in 1980 at age 31, he’s been in the driver’s seat ever since—filling a post that, he says, “I absolutely love.”

LB Transit and the city love this innovative leader—and rightly so. Today the system has more than 1,000 employees and some 180 full-size buses. Soon half of them will be fuel-efficient, clean-air hybrid electrics. Seven years ago, long before these $500,000 vehicles were in vogue, Jackson and LB Transit were the first in the nation to begin adding them to their fleet. Other innovations followed, such as curb-to-curb Dial-A-Lift service for disabled riders and the colorful AquaLink and AquaBus options on Long Beach Harbor.

It’s no surprise, then, that among its many awards, LB Transit has been recognized as North America’s outstanding bus system by the American Public Transit Association.

“Fun, customer-friendly innovations will help entice area residents to try public transportation and reduce gas consumption,” Jackson says. “On a personal note, Long Beach is home for all my family, and one son has asthma. So innovations that continue cleaning up the air we breathe will always be a huge priority for me.”




Born in Shanghai, Nien-Ling Wacker is the president and CEO of Laserfiche, a successful Long Beach software company. Educated in Australia and the United States, Wacker has created a company that promotes the harmony of Eastern culture, the ambition and growth of Western culture, and the scientific methods of physics.

It all began when Nien-Ling set out to develop a computer system that could capture and index information from scanned paper documents. Her goal was to create an “auxiliary brain” that would organize information so that users could instantly find specific bits by simply searching for a word or phrase.

By 1987, technology became available that coincided with her vision, and she developed Laserfiche digital document management software, bringing document imaging and full-text search to the PC. With a team of 200, her company has continued to develop advanced solutions for business process management, auditing, and records management that are used by more than 25,000 organizations—including government offices, Fortune 1000 companies, healthcare organizations, and financial services firms.

Today, Wacker continues to provide vision and focus for Laserfiche. She has been particularly focused on expanding the Laserfiche Institute training division to provide industry-leading educational resources. “With technology changing so quickly and more emphasis on managing information properly, our customers are increasingly looking to us as experts to help them continue to address these issues,” she says.




Trained in civil engineering and licensed as a broker, Mo Tidemanis built a successful career in private-sector land development. “Twenty years in the trenches of that very competitive industry forced me to be innovative and creative,” he says.

Attracted to those qualities, the CSULB Foundation hired Tidemanis to create affordable housing for faculty and staff. His signature project is the Press-Telegram Lofts, a radical “re-purposing” of the newspaper’s former headquarters in downtown Long Beach. Sixty of the 542 residential units, slated for completion in 2010, will be sold to CSULB faculty and staff at cost.

“Because there’s essentially no vacant land in the city, Long Beach must innovatively address reuse of underutilized property,” Tidemanis says. The lofts are a prime example. So is an even more ambitious undertaking: the CSULB Technology Park, located on 30 acres of former Navy housing in west Long Beach. Tidemanis and his team partnered with the Navy, city, and university, and oversaw construction of 330,000 square feet of buildings that now house trade schools and port-related companies.

What the Navy identified as its “worst housing project” has been reborn. In Tidemanis’s words, the site is now “productive and economically healthy.” That’s an innovation!




For the past 10 years, Jean Egan has worked tirelessly to place education at the top of the city’s agenda. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Egan worked as an attorney until the birth of her daughter, Ann.Then she turned her talents to helping children learn.

As executive director of the Boyle Heights Elementary Institute, Egan led a non-profit organization aimed at increasing college access for inner-city kids. She founded Better Learning After School Today (BLAST) when she saw that Long Beach needed quality after-school programs for primary-grade students. Egan did everything to make that happen – the grant writing, program development, development of a board, and coordination with the school district to bring the programs to the kids. She accomplished all this with no compensation and only a dream to fulfill and a need to meet.

Egan also chaired the mayor’s Youth and Education Task Force, working with community leaders, education professionals, and parents to keep kids on everyone’s radar screen. For two years, from 1998 to 2000, Jean worked with community leaders, education professionals, school district personnel and parents to develop goals and objectives that would create the City’s plan for its children and youth through 2010.



For Michael O’Toole and Peter Joseph, work is a whole lot of fun. Although separated by about 20 years, both grew up in Long Beach and both believe Long Beach’s waterfront is one of the best places on Earth. O’Toole owns and manages Gondola Getaway with his partner, Dave Black. O’Toole is also a partner with Joseph in another attraction—The Big Red Bus.

“I grew up on Naples and spent a lot of time in the canals and in the bay,” O’Toole says. “For a college project, I wrote a business and marketing plan for a gondola service. After I graduated, I thought, ‘Hey, this could work.’”

In 1982, O’Toole purchased an old Pakistani fishing boat, refurbished it, and started the company. A year later, he took Black on as a partner and the two began building a fleet of 10 gondolas. A couple of years ago, O’Toole bought the double-decker known as The Big Red Bus to offer “Pub Crawl” excursions.

O’Toole notes that if you can meet a need by doing something you love, nothing can stop you. “My heart has always been with the ocean,” he adds.

Joseph agrees: “The waterfront is one of Long Beach’s greatest assets. There is still so much untapped potential. It’s really exciting to be part of what is going on here.”




Blanche has an intense devotion to helping others and a fascination with the joy of being dedicated to all that’s best in life. There are those who, when faced with a significant personal loss, would retreat, but not her. Even after losing her beloved husband of forty-two years, Canady vigorously continued to be active in making our city a better place in which to live and improve the quality of our educational system.

She spent 21 years as an elementary school principal serving at Edison and Whittie, even opening Keller, Henry, and Cleveland Elementary Schools. In 1974, she was promoted to Assistant Superintendent where she developed a Long Beach reception center for non-English speaking immigrants, later becoming a prototype for such centers throughout California.

Then in the 1980’s, Canady’s major impact on the community was founding the very first “working woman’s” charity group CAMEO, an auxiliary of the Assistance League of Long Beach; a unique mentoring program to help advance the status of students in the Women’s Program at Long Beach City College and both female and male high school students in the LB Unified School District. Cameo’s Annual Fashion Show each spring raises $250,000 in a one-day event funding their mentoring programs, and allowing those students annual stipends for yearbooks, interview clothing, tutoring, and, in their senior year, a trip to Washington D.C.