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OBITUARY » B5

Cosmo’sHelenGurleyBrown diesat age 90

By Julia Prodis Sulekjsulek@mercurynews.com

SAN JOSE — If only Thomas Kinkade’s ownhome in Monte Sereno were as tranquil and idyl-lic as the storybook cottages he painted.

Instead, the late artist’s stately mansion withthe curving driveway and leafy landscape has be-come a battleground in the brutal fight between his widow and girlfriend who still lives there forhis fortune.

Security guards have been stationed insidethe gates day and night to make sure the girl-

Battle for artist’s estate is intensifyingKinkade’s girlfriend won’t leavehouse as court date draws near

MILLIONS ON THE LINE

Lawyers for NanetteKinkade say Pinto, left,

undulyinfluenced the artist inthe writing ofthe will and

she is “holding hostagethis residence.”

Lawyers for Pinto say she is only carrying out thewishes of Kinkade and wants the money and art to establish a museum.

LAUREN PURKEY/STAFF

Estate lawyers have hired guards to keep watch over Kinkade’s mansion.

By Paul Rogers progers@mercurynews.com

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK— On a steep hill in Mariposa Grove, with enormous sequoias towering overhead, 12-year-old Marcella Tapiapaused for a break.

A dozen other kids, dressed in “Yo-semite Volunteer” yellow vests, dug and tugged and pulled out the roots of bull thistles, leafy green mullein and other invasive plants, huffing and puffing as they piled them up nearby.

“I don’t like cleaning up my house,”said a smiling Marcella, of East PaloAlto. “But I like cleaning up this house.”

That sentiment is spreading in Yosemite, as increasing private dona-tions are expanding programs that teach children — particularly kidsfrom urban areas who may never have visited a national park — a vari-ety of skills, from trail work to wildlifebiology.

This year, more than 47,000 young

Wilderness link: Young people from urban areas are exploring California’s most popular park thanks to donations from nonprofits

Yosemiteyouthmovement

INVESTING IN YOUNG EXPLORERSThe Yosemite Conservancy wants to bring more young people into thepark, particularly Latino, African-American and Asian-American kidsunfamiliar with the wilderness. Among the programs:YOUTH CONSERVA-TION CORPS: Kidsrestore trails and camp-fire rings and install picnic tables.PARKS IN FOCUS PROGRAM: Middleschool students come to the park for five daysand learn photography skills and environmentalscience. The curriculumincludes fire ecology and park history.TURN OFF DEVICES:No cellphones, texting orvideo games allowed.

47,000 $1.3 millionParticipants in all youth programs, more than double five years ago.

Annual spending on youth programs by the Yosemite Conservancy.

BY THE NUMBERS

LAUREN PURKEY/STAFF PHOTOS

Leilany Navarro, 12, above, walks with program leader Tyler Benjamin among sequoias at Yosemite NationalPark. Top, from left: Leilany, Shontelle Watkins, 14, and Marcella Tapia, 12, look at the pelt of a Pacific fisher.

COURTESY OF SHONTELLE WATKINS

Shontelle Watkins, 14, of Menlo Park,took this photo at Yosemite as part of theParks in Focus program.

ONE LAST LOOKRaiders drop their exhibition season opener to Cowboys, 3-0SPORTS

Photos capture the delight, despair, wonder and magic of the 2012 London Olympics SPORTS, D8

By Matt Krupnickmkrupnick@bayareanewsgroup.com

If you’re a Californian interested in taking up graduate studies in January at a California State University campus, think again.

But if you live in another state or country,check it out and sign yourcheck.

Cal State leaders have told the university’s 23 campuses they will not be allowed to admit California graduate students for the spring term, which starts in January. Budget cuts made the system in the coming spring term unable to af-ford residents’ heavily dis-counted education, campus leaders were told.

But nonresident students — who pay consid-erably higher fees — remain welcome, at leastat some campuses, and that has become an issue leading some rebellious graduate schools to turn away the non-Californians — and the fi nancialwindfall they would bring .

CAL STATE OUTRAGE

Freezeby CSUsparks revoltDepartments rebel against policy to block admission ofgraduate students from state

$7,356

$16,284

What most in-state grad students pay for a 24-unit year

What an out-of-state grad student pays for the samecourse load

GRADUATE TUITION

By Steve Peoples and Ken ThomasAssociated Press

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden movedquickly Monday to link GOP rivals Mitt Rom-ney and Paul Ryan to House Republicans who Democrats blame for causing gridlock in Washington and pressing policies to protect the wealthy.

Campaigning in Iowa, Obama ac-cused Ryan of block-ing a congressional farm bill, seeking to link Romney by ex-tension to a Wash-ington stalemate that is denying Mid-western farmers the resources they need to cope with a crippling drought.

“If you happen to see Congressman Ryan, tell him how important this farm bill is to Iowa and our rural communities,” Obama said. “We’ve got

ELECTION 2012

Democrats linkGOP rivals toD.C. gridlockRomney defends Ryan, says ticket will ‘preserve and protect Medicare’

JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

In Iowa, Obama ties Romney to blockage of a critical farm bill.

See CAMPAIGN, Page 8

MARK LENNIHAN/AP ARCHIVES

See CSU, Page 4

See KINKADE, Page 8

See YOSEMITE, Page 4

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people will participate in 30 programs at Yosemite, more than double the num-ber of students from fi veyears ago.

Much of the growth is due to a concerted effort by a San Francisco nonprofi tgroup, the Yosemite Con-servancy, which has tripled its annual spending for youth programs at the park in recent years, to $1.3 mil-lion. The money is funding everything from Yosemite’s popular Junior Ranger pro-gram to its Youth Conser-vation Corps, a group of 35high school students who restored 30 miles of trails, replaced 175 campfi re ringsand installed 125 new picnic tables in the park last year.

Learning from nature“It’s stunning the change

you see in kids,” said Mike Tollefson, president of the Yosemite Conservancy.“Kids learn about them-selves. They learn about who they are. They go away with great life experiences, whether it’s learning theirrole in doing the dishes at night or learning how to work with others. Theylearn about self-confi denceand their own value away from home.”

Tollefson grew up fi shingand camping as a boy in Se-attle, then worked more than three decades for the Na-tional Park Service, serving as superintendent of Yosem-ite from 2003 to 2009, and beforethatassuperintendent of Great Smoky Mountains, Sequoia-Kings Canyon and

Glacier Bay national parks.Over the past 25 years,

the Yosemite Conservancy,formerly known as the Yo-semite Fund, was mainly known for raising privatemoney to help the park complete high-profile con-struction projects. It raised $13.5 million in 1999 to re-build the trails, bridges and signs around Yosemite Falls .It also donated $1.8 millionto renovate parking and landscaping at Tunnel View in 2008. The conservancy is spending $1.7 million to re-route trails, plant native wil-lows and place new educa-tional signs at Tenaya Lake.

Another nonprofi t, Na-tureBridge in San Fran-cisco, formerly known as the Yosemite Institute, has run programs for school classrooms at the park for40 years.

But in this era of video games, cellphones and rampant childhood obesity, Tollefson, his board and sup-porters are on a crusade to spend more on human capi-tal, too. Their goal is to bringmore kids into Yosemite — particularly Latino, Af-rican-American and Asian-American kids who live incommunities surroundedby traffic, crime and con-crete — so they can tramp along trails, get their hands dirty and sleep outside. It’s not just good for them, they believe, it’s essential to the future of the national park system.

“We are trying to build long-term support for pres-ervation and stewardship of public lands,” said Don Neu-bacher, Yosemite’s current superintendent. “My view isone kid at a time.”

On a recent Thursday in July, Marcella and a dozenother kids from the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula participated in the Parks in Focus program, which teaches middle school stu-dents about environmentalscience by giving them digi-tal cameras, teaching them basic photography skills andbringing them to Yosemite for five days.

Yosemite’s grandeurThe students from East

Palo Alto and Menlo Park camped in Yosemite Valleyand looked at Saturn’s ringsthrough a telescope. They spent two days at Wawona,learned about fi re ecology,removed invasive weeds and learned about the park’s history that included NativeAmericans, Abraham Lin-coln and John Muir. There were no cellphones, no tex-ting and no video games al-lowed.

“My goal is to give them the opportunity to slowdown,” said Shauna Po-tocky, Yosemite’s branch chief of education, “and ex-perience who they are and to realize that people who they’ve never met saved places like this for them.”

The grandeur of Yosem-ite — and how different it is from his neighborhood in East Palo Alto — wasn’t lost on 12-year-old Luis Chavez.

“Our community isn’t known for having a lot of kids go to college,” Luis said. “But these kids here learn photography. They might want to become a professional photographer. Or maybe a park ranger.”

Asked how the program had affected her life, 14-year-old Shontelle Watkins, of Menlo Park, grinnedbroadly.

“I’m coming back,” she said. And a minute later, camera snapping, she headed up the trail.

Paul Rogers covers resources and environmental issues.Contact him at 408-920-5045. Follow him at Twitter.com/paulrogerssjmn.

We either take bothkinds of students or none, one professor said.

“It’s appalling, andI would never, ever goalong with” excluding resident students, said Maria Nieto, a Cal StateEast Bay biology profes-sor who coordinates herdepartment’s graduatestudies. “To say, ‘You can accept these students atthe exclusion of California students,’ goes against themission of CSU.”

The philosophical de-bate illustrates the tough times facing the univer-sity. Budget cuts are shut-ting out students fromschools generations of Californians paid taxes to build.

Only a handful of cam-puses will accept under-graduates for the springterm, which falls midwaythrough the academicyear. Undergraduates are far more plentiful thangraduate students at CalState, comprising 86 per-cent of some 430,000 stu-dents.

Cal State generallyenrolls 16,000 to 18,000students from other statesor countries. Spring-term,nonresident graduate stu-dents are rare: some 300statewide, a university spokesman estimated.

The residency debatehas roiled the 10-campus University of California, which has boosted itsnonresident numbers inrecent years. The influx ofstudents from other statesand countries so upsetsome people that one leg-islator this year proposed limiting nonresidents at UC.

Out-of-state and inter-national students bringdiversity to college cam-puses, proponents say, and the extra money they pay helps schools offsetyears of budget cuts. Mostgraduate students from California will pay $7,356in Cal State tuition in2012-13; nonresidents will pay an additional $372per semester unit, whichamounts to $8,928 for 24units per year on top oftuition.

University leaders needto let Californians know that nonresident students are not taking seats whereresidents would ordinar-ily sit, said Diana WrightGuerin, a Cal State Fuller-ton professor and chair-woman of the systemwideAcademic Senate.

“We have not done avery good job of commu-nicating with the public,”

said Wright Guerin, who supports the admissionof nonresident students.“Yeah, I would be upset if I heard they were accepting students from New York or Illinois but turning away California residents. We need to explain why that is.”

Communication is thekey to the university find-ing support from students,parents and taxpayers,said Jerry Chang, a resi-dent student who is work-ing on master’s degrees in statistics and engineeringmanagement at Cal State East Bay.

“I’d like to see the uni-versity make sure people are aware of the change,” said Chang, the school’s student-body president. “There’s been so many changes in the past year that everybody’s trying to get a handle.”

San Jose State offi -cials said their reason foraccepting nonresidents is clear: They need the money.

“It’s right at the headof campus priorities to pick up additional reve-nues,” said Bill Nance, thecampus’s vice presidentfor student affairs. “We agree it’s not fair to Cali-fornians.”

Although San JoseState made a campus-wide decision to acceptout-of-state and interna-tional applications, CalState East Bay left the decision to individual de-partments. The biologydepartment decided notto accept the out-of-statestudents, but othersgritted their teeth and opened their doors.

“It’s grossly unfair,”said Matt Johnson, chair-man of Cal State EastBay’s math and computer science department. About 50 students from outside California have applied for spring admis-sion, he said. “It’s a lose-lose proposition.”

Some departments, including Johnson’s, have delayed a final decision, hoping they will be able to accept Californians if vot-ers in November pass Gov.Jerry Brown’s tax hikes.

Many academics fi ndthe issue distasteful.

“Personally, I feel quite crummy about the wholething,” said Peter Marsh,a Cal State East Bay music professor who coordinates his department’s graduate program.

“I understand where it’s coming from, but the message it sends is not a good one.”

Follow Matt Krupnicat Twitter.com/mattkrupnick.

LAUREN PURKEY/STAFF

Members of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula meet with leaders to discuss their Yosemite experience.

ONLINE EXTRAScan this code on a smartphone to view a photo gallery or see it at

http://photos.mercurynews.com.

By Leanne ItalieAssociated Press

NEW YORK — It’s aboutfreakin’ time.

The term “F-bomb” sur-faced in newspapers morethan 20 years ago but will land Tuesday for the first time in the mainstreamMerriam-Webster’s Colle-giate Dictionary, along withsexting, flexitarian, obeso-genic, energy drink and life coach.

In all, the company picksabout 100 additions for the 114-year-old dictionary’s an-nual update, gathering evi-dence of usage over severalyears in everything from

media to the labels of beer bottles and boxes of frozen food.

So who’s responsible for lobbing F-bomb far and wide? Kory Stamper, an associate editor for Merriam-Webster, said she and her fellow word spies at the Massachusetts company traced it back to 1988, in a Newsday story that had the now-dead Mets catcher Gary Carter talking about how he had given them up, along with other profani-ties.

But the word didn’t really take off until the late ’90s, after Bobby Knight went heavy on the F-bombs dur-

ing a locker room tirade.“We saw another huge

spike after Dick Cheney dropped an F-bomb in theSenate in 2004,” and again in 2010 when Vice Presi-dent Joe Biden did the same thing in the same place,Stamper said.

“It’s a word that is veryvisually evocative. It’s not just the F-word. It’s F-bomb. You know that it’s going tocause a lot of consternation and possible damage,” she said.

Many online dictionary and reference sites already list F-bomb and other en-tries Merriam-Webster is

only now putting into print. A competitor, Oxford Uni-versity Press, has F-bomb under consideration for a future update of its New Oxford American Diction-ary but beat Merriam-Web-ster to print on a couple of other newcomers: mash-up, added to the Oxford book in 2005, and cloud computing, included in 2010.

No worries, Stampersaid. The dictionary biz isn’t a race.

Merriam-Webster’s Col-legiate gets a cover-to-cover overhaul every decade or so in addition to yearly up-grades.

F-bomb finally drops into the dictionary

CSUContinued from Page 1

YosemiteContinued from Page 1