In The News - May 2001

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The Magazine of Santa Clarita, May 2001

Article: Lindsay Wagner Presents Woman of Honor Award

by Elodie Ackerman - Editor

When the Betty Ferguson Foundation called to ask if actress Lindsay Wagner would present the Woman of Honor Award to local businesswoman Cheri Fleming at the Foundation’s first annual dinner, she said she’d like to hear more about their mission.

The Foundation is working to build a center that will provide mentoring programs in photography; set decoration; costume design; dance; pre- and post-production in film, music and sound; practical financial education and “domestic engineering.”

“It’s something that strikes your heart,” Ms. Wagner says.

With 20th-Century social changes that resulted in the nuclear rather than extended family, Wagner recognizes that something has been lost. Rather than grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren living, loving, learning and teaching together, families break apart and move to other towns, other parts of the country and the world. Cut off from friends and family, these two-generation families must be completely self-contained and self-sustaining.

“I’ve done a lot of work with native communities,” she says, “where learning is an innate part of their culture and the extended family helps the child learn.”

And that, she believes, is what the Betty Ferguson Foundation is trying to get back to.

“In general, it’s a sign of our community starting to think as a community again. It’s an interesting thing in our culture. With all its rules and laws, the community as a whole is organized. But it’s cut off once it gets to the personal level.

“This Betty Ferguson Foundation is an expression of people finally remembering how important the extended family is, and bringing some of that back,” Wagner explains.

It was an act of reaching out that rescued a troubled Lindsay Wagner when she was a teenager. “I was never interested in becoming an actress,” she recalled. “I learned to act because of someone who reached out to me, who saw how backed up, emotionally, I was and wanted to help.

Lindsay, who lived with her grandmother while her mother worked out some problems of her own, earned extra money babysitting for actor James Best and his wife.

“He noticed that the more pain I was in, the more jokes I told. I had no outlet.”

Best invited Lindsay to participate in an acting class he was teaching. “He gave me a role in a Tennessee Williams play about a sad young girl,” she recalled, “giving me a place to learn the value of sharing my feelings.”
It was one of Best’s acting showcases that resulted in Wagner’s getting “discovered.”

For all her success and ageless beauty, Lindsay Wagner still remembers the pain and difficulty that young people experience and how having a creative outlet can make the difference in a young person’s life.

For more information, contact the Betty Ferguson Foundation, 25876 The Old Road, Valencia, CA, 91381. Phone: 661-284-3551. Nonprofit501(c) Public Charity. Fed ID #95-4726134.