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30
Apr 12

An indoor picnic

Last field trip of the semester today. I took my class to meet the nice people at Hoffman Media, who runs an always-growing office not too far from campus. They just bought a new magazine last week, Louisiana Cooking. I believe that’s nine special interest magazines under their banner these days.

The students learned about layout, scheduling, food photography, menu prep, circulation strategies AND got a tour of some of their six test kitchens.

No wonder the students always think that’s one of the better trips of the year. You should see the food stored in those pantries. They test every recipe, and re-test it, before it goes in the magazines. They say the only downside is when their cooking fish, or Mexican first thing in the morning.

The journalism and mass communication department’s awards picnic was this evening. Some two dozen awards and honors were given to people I’ve had in class or worked with in the student media.

Some of them I had in their freshman classes, and now they’re getting set to graduate. They grow so fast …

Last night I watched a bit of Apollo 13 for the 478th time. Love that movie, even the parts where it diverges from history, it does so a bit apologetically. I can take that. It is one of the better film adaptations of a book — in this case the book — that I can recall seeing.

Up the dial a bit Forrest Gump was also on. It allowed me to tell the movie theater story, where a woman in an Apollo 13 screening was frightened for the crew’s safety. Her son said something like “Don’t worry mom, Forrest Gump will get them home.”

I mention all of this because that little tale is cute, but mostly because I wanted to post this video, which is one of the most deliberately underplayed, intense lines ever.

Turns out that’s Ron Howard’s mother playing the part. Jean Speegle Howard was still working until shortly before she died in 2000.

That quote isn’t from the Jim Lovell/Jeffrey Kluger book, but the real Blanch Lovell is in there, scroll down just a bit:

I bet she would have delivered that line with even greater elan.

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24
Apr 12

The long day

Last week we had the board members from the Alabama Press Association on campus. Today, it is Gene Policinski, the vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center in Washington D.C.

Things are hoping around here.

Policinski met with student-journalists at the Crimson this morning. I treated him to a mid-morning snack after that and he told me how he got in the business, where he’s been and his upcoming projects. Very interesting — and nice — guy.

The department took him and a few students to lunch at The Rotunda Club, the exclusive dining arrangement on campus. We ate in a beautiful wood-paneled room with monogramed plates and personal attention.

I hope whatever organization that normally dines there was able to make do with vending machines.

We had a student media committee meeting, electing next year’s editors for the literary arts magazine, Sojourn, the yearbook, Entre Nous, and The Samford Crimson.

This evening Policinski was the featured guest at the Timothy Sumner Robinson Forum. This is a Samford program named for a 1965 alumnus. The Robinson family hosts the event each year in honor of Timothy, who was a veteran of The Washington Post and the National Law Journal.

At the Post Robinson had more Watergate front page stories than anyone. He’d go on to work at NYU, and then head west to pioneer much of the first online media work.

Here’s Policinski speaking in Bolding Studio about the constitutionally “unique role” of journalists in the political and legal system:

He notes “We have turned to an era where we talk to people directly.”

He applaud bloggers and citizen journalists, but notes a difference between what they might do and what a committed court reporter could offer as coverage. He’s right, and it isn’t about the journalism, but about the legal system. There’s a need, he says, for more legal training, which is part of a big project he has coming up soon with his many professional affiliations.

The state of legal reporting is in decline, but not because of the people covering it, but by volume. Meanwhile, he says, the journalism profession is “if not walking away from it is turning away because of other pressing issues.”

Great to have him on campus, though it made for a long day (and after that there was still the newspaper). It was worth it. You can follow him on Twitter @genefac.

Don’t forget: Tumblr and Twitter.

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21
Apr 12

The three Heisman statues

Finally got to see these today. They’re quite impressive. And at a reported $100,000, they better be.

(A statue of a living person is unfortunate, but we’ve already crossed that bridge.)

The unveiling, last weekend, with Pat Sullivan, Bo Jackson and Cam Newton all in attendance:

Wish they’d used an Auburn sculptor — remember what Shug said — but the Ken Bjorge from Montana did fine work. (Here he is working on the Heisman bust which is a bit of disembodied creepiness.)

Maybe the best part is the strategic positioning, with the official Heisman portrait of each man looking over the statue. Nice touch.

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15
Apr 12

The River Walk

You probably can’t have San Antonio without the River Walk. It fills up with tourists at shops and bars and restaurants at night, but on Saturday morning, as The Yankee and I happily discovered, it is quiet, still and serene:

There are bridges for the over the road traffic passing just overhead, but that seems about as far removed from people on the walk itself as possible. There are also pedestrian crossovers to get you to that restaurant you really want to try on the other side without having to rejoin the land of the suckers.

There are also the boats, one part tour, one part mass transit system and, sometimes, a dinner cruise. Here the passengers were learning about the historic architecture overlooking the San Antonio River:

Among those trees and ducks and squirrels and ferns you can find too many people, or the feeling of a land lost. In the early morning hours only the odd mosaic are there to disturb you. One tells you that just a few feet away is a tree where a Mexican sniper hid to pick off Texan settlers.

Enjoy rounding that corner, friends.

Another mosaic, for reasons never explained, lays out the city’s interstate grid. A better one shows the modern route of the carefully controlled river. From that one you can start to figure out how all of this came together.

For if you can’t have modern San Antonio without the River Walk, you can’t have the River Walk without Bowen’s Island.

In the middle of the 19th century they called it Galveston Island, but it was technically a peninsula bordered on three sides by the river and on the fourth by an important local irrigation system. The local postmaster, John Bowen, built his home there. When he died in 1867 it turned into a beer garden, a market and what we today would probably call a recreational area. Gymnastics, picnics and religious meetings all took place there.

The Bowen family held onto the land until 1910. Developers rerouted the river, made the nearby streets longer and put to work their vision of a 10-acre site for buildings, including a hotel, the Federal Reserve Bank and commercial buildings.

None of that could have been done, perhaps, without Robert H. H. Hugman. He was the architect that had the idea to spruce up the place. His fingerprints are everywhere, as are these bronze plaques, replicating the stamp he placed on all his drawings:

And so here we are today.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of these restaurants where the gimmick is the waitstaff gets to treat you horribly bad. We’ve been to two locations of Dirty Dick’s. One, in Boston, because we were hungry and they sat us for lunch right away. Tonight we ate at the one on the River Walk … for much the same reason, actually.

At lunch they have perfectly good burgers. And, for whatever reason, the guy we had in Boston was relaxed and chatty with us. Meanwhile they were simply abusing other tables. This is probably good therapy for people who’ve waited tables one-shift-too-many, but I’m not sure why the customers show up.

Anyway, the dinner was OK tonight, though not as good as the lunchtime burger half a continent and almost a removed from my memory. We had a large group tonight, six adults, all people with way too much money invested in their brains, and a really sharp four-year-old.

The waitress tonight started out to give us a little grief which, I don’t know about you, but no thanks. And then it just … stopped. It was like she just noticed the child sitting with us. Oh you get the hat with the stupid insult on it, there’s no escaping that, but she was fine, left us alone, didn’t overtly scar the kid and we all pretended like we didn’t notice.

Maybe there’s a vibe some tables give off.

So the little boy, the son of two of our friends at dinner with us, gets into a dance contest with me. And he was awesome. Remind me to never do that again. The restaurant had a local band playing, and we caught maybe their first two songs, including something from the early 1960s soul era that I’ve already forgotten. I just sit in the chair and bop along a bit because the boy and I have become buddies.

I break out the classic stupid dances of our generation: the shopping cart, the sprinkler, the Q-tip, making the pizza.

The child responds with what he calls the Lighting Lawnmower. He sticks out his hands, tenses up his entire body and starts a little shimmy which soon turns into a full-on, almost violent shake. Suddenly the lawn mower image is out of control. He’s not pushing the mower, but hanging on for dear life as it runs over everything in site.

It was awesome. No one knows where he got it from and all agreed he easily won our dance competition. Even me, and I don’t mean in that “Sure, you were better than me kid” way.

At the end of the night he gave me what he called dinosaur hugs, which seem to involve choking me out, tackling me and roaring a lot. He’s a cool kid, despite his need to defeat me in light saber duels and mock finger-pistol shootouts all weekend.

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14
Apr 12

My day, and a bit of recent San Antonio history

Busy conference day. I presented two papers. The first was a piece I co-authored with my pal Skye titled “In the Huddle: SCCT Analysis of NFL and Players’ Association 2011 Lockout Strategies” which looked at that particular piece of business through the Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory. In the final analysis they followed part of the model perfectly, but blew it elsewhere.

The second paper was a piece on the Colbert Super PAC, which was one part history of PACs that led to this moment, one part speculation on what Colbert was doing, where Super PACs are taking us and, finally, announcing the latest financials they’ve raised and spent. That is a lot of money.

That paper, which I co-authored with The Yankee, was well received. It won top paper honors. I got a plaque and everything. Not too shabby.

And immediately after that session I served as a respondent in another session.

How this works: someone has grouped a small handful of papers together for the researchers to discuss their examination and findings to their audience, as I did twice earlier today. Another person, the respondent, is assigned to make some larger sense of it all. The respondent’s job is often to find a common thread, but also give some feedback on the papers, deliver some helpful criticism as they continue their research and so on.

I was asked to be the respondent on a mass communication panel titled “‘Talking’ with the People We ‘Know’ Best: Traditional Interaction as it Happens Online.” (Academics aren’t known for riveting titles.) I had four fine papers to read, which makes being a respondent enjoyable. You read things beyond your area and, if you are conscientious about it, you find yourself working hard to make your actual response worthwhile.

It takes some time and sometimes a bit of trepidation. One of those papers I knew nothing about when I started reading. The nice person that wrote it is the expert. What can I say to that person? But eventually you find something. No study is perfect and all that.

And this might be a first: the timekeeper flashed me a one-minute sign. Not sure I’ve ever seen a respondent threaten to go over the allotted time before.

I hope it was at least a little bit worth it to the researchers.

This is Schilo’s:

Pronounce it “She-Lows.”

This is one of those downtown dining institutions. I’d had lunch there two days in a row. Yesterday it was the Wienerschnitzel of breaded pork and a side of red cabbage. Today I had the Friday special, which was a deliciously salty roast beef with mashed potatoes and green beans.

(UPDATE: The next day, Saturday, we returned for breakfast. I had the potato pancakes, which were not the best potato pancakes I’ve ever had by any measure. But the lunches? Oh they know their lunches.)

A man named Fritz Schilo opened a saloon 90 miles away in Beeville, Texas just after the turn of the 20th century. In 1914 he packed up his family and moved his booze joint to San Antonio. Three years later: Prohibition.

So the saloon business dried up. He opened a restaurant. His wife made the food for a location not too far away from this one. He moved next door in 1927, and Fritz Schilo stayed on through the first part of the Depression, until he died in 1935. His son, Edgar, took over and in 1942, during another war, they moved to the current location. You wonder if the family, before they sold the business sometime after the war, ever measured big personal events around big international events.

You’d think, from the perspective of history, everyone did. But do we? Aside from the occasional “Where were you when?” moment, probably not. Still, that Prohibition timing was pretty rough on ol’ Fritz.

A bit more local history, John Wayne stayed at our hotel twice during premieres of two separate movies. He charmed them so well the second time they named a suite after him:

And here’s the man John Wayne wished he could have been. That’s Audie Murphy, second from the right:

The man next to him, unknown to whomever wrote the caption below the picture on display in the hotel lobby, looks positively beside himself with nausea. You would, too, if you were taking a picture with Murphy. If you don’t know what that’s about, you should do a little reading.

(UPDATE: The guy on the far right might be Harold Russell a World War II veteran who is one of only two non-professional actors to win an Oscar for his acting in The Best Years of Our Life. Russell had an amazing life.)

The hotel itself is lovely, in the lobby. The rooms are a bit shabby for the $160 rate they’re asking from conference-goers. We got a slightly better rate. The joke of the conference has been “What broke in your room this morning?” Oh, roughly everything. We’ll see about those rates again later this weekend.

Oh? The Alamo? Everyone says it is smaller than you’d think. And there’s no basement.