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history / journalism / memories / photo / weekend — Comments Off
11
Sep 11

September 11, 2001-2011

Condensed and reprinted, for the final time I think, from notes I wrote in 2003.

It was my first week working in a new newsroom Little Rock. The top local story of the day was the Little Rock Zoo regaining its accreditation. The anchors there could not pronounce “accreditation” correctly, but that was the big story for the day.

A phone call from our traffic reporter, just landed from his morning flight, started like this “You might want to tell the (people on air) to turn on a TV, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center and they are talking about the zoo.”

I made my way into the studio to announce that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.

As they got up to speed the second plane hit the opposite tower. Bryant Gumbel was interviewing an eye witness. A camera was pointed up into the sky. The eye witness broadcast the second plane crashing. It could no longer be an accident.

My producer later told me that I was so surprised, watching it happen in real time, that I just announced it out loud. He could hear me two rooms away.

I called for New York on one phone, dialing the NYC area codes and pushing random numbers hoping for a connection. Because so much communications equipment was tied into the Towers, seemingly the whole borough was down. I wanted to say “Stick your head outside and tell me what you see.”

In my other ear I was on a phone call with the Pentagon. They aren’t confirming it was a terrorist attack, but they are looking into it, a spokesman says. Moments later I tried to reach my Pentagon source again, but there was no answer. We find out a moment later that a plane has crashed there.

I learned about a year later that the office of the guy I was talking to was located not very far from the impact site at the Pentagon.

We started calling local officials to try and make a local angle on the story, it’s what you do on a huge story far removed from your location. There was a bomb threat called in to a prominent Little Rock building. An announcement was made that planes nationwide are being pulled out of the sky. They all land at the first airport that has an appropriate runway. This is unprecedented in the nation’s history of flight. (And a remarkable feat of logistics, looking back.)

I dashed across town to the airport. I’m to talk to people getting off planes. I get to ask these people “What have you heard? What did they tell you on the plane? How does it feel to know that, but for the grace of God, ‘there go I’?”

As I arrive at the airport, the first building collapsed on itself. ABC’s Peter Jennings, now being simulcast on radio, very somberly says, “Oh my God.”

The airport was packed. I’ve lived here for less than a week and have already been in the airport five times. Now there’s confusion. Tears. Cell phones and scrambling for rental cars and hotels. I talked to dozens of people. They all had stories.

Some were travelling across country, heading to the northeast. One flight was told they were having mechanical difficulties and had to land. It wasn’t until they could called their loved ones that they knew. One man wasn’t sure he could find Arkansas on a map. A Sikh was there alone. In his eyes, he knew. He seemed to already understand what had happened on a level the rest of us would come to grasp in the coming days. He was afraid. I still wonder about him.

We did great work for the next 10 hours, about 15 in total for the day. I was proud to be a part of that product. I finally made it home in time to watch the Congressional leadership and the still-stirring end to their press conference.

Auburn / football / history / photo / weekend — 1 Comment
4
Sep 11

A funny thing happened on the way to Harvey Updyke’s trial

Let’s be honest. This hasn’t been about the individual who allegedly poisoned the historic oaks at Toomer’s Corner since he discovered a talk radio host would put him on the air. This hasn’t been about the oaks themselves since the day he first appeared in court.

This is about Auburn’s people.

Auburn University has gone to great lengths and expense to save the oaks. The campus experts have consulted with some of their best peers in the country. The community grieved a bit, accepted the support and condolences of friends near and far and is moving on in a wait-and-see environment.

The university decided in mid-summer that they would allow for Toomer’s Corner to be rolled again this fall. The cleanup was the concern, they said, and the firm that does the cleaning would no longer use a pressure wash system, but would clean the trees by hand.

And so football is here. There’s new signage everywhere. Many things in town and on campus are unchanged, as they often are. Many things in town and on campus are new, as they often are. The Tigers won their home opener; fans rolled Toomer’s Corner.

But it all feels different now.

Opinions varied when the roll on announcement was made. Some were ready to continue the tradition. Others counseled restrain. More than a few groups volunteered to help with the cleaning. It was time, they said to themselves, to demonstrate a new kind of contribution to a place they appreciate. After the season’s first game, some of them followed through and helped with the cleanup. Volunteers came and went, working alongside the professional cleaning company for a brief time. It rained and the mushy paper turned even more fragile.

But the health of the trees and the soaked cellulose are the only things around Toomer’s Corner that are fragile. The spirit is strong.

What makes history?

I thought a lot about that while we helped clean up the celebration today. We decided, for our part, that we’d clean a little farther down College Street.

That tree above grows near Langdon Hall and, while it is a bit younger than the Toomer’s Oaks, it has a history of its own. Inside Langdon Hall they debated secession. Near this spot is where students of another generation heard President Roosevelt ask for a declaration of war over a loudspeaker after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. Near here is the lathe that commemorates Auburn’s role in the Civil War as a hospital and who’s young men served. Recovered from Selma and presented to Auburn in 1952, it has been the site of endless ghost tales these last 60 years. Near this spot many young couples have been engaged, another was recently married and, during my time in school, I asked a nice girl out on a date and she agreed. That’s a lot of history, too.

None of those things belong to a tree, but to the people of Auburn.

^{The greatest generation would help clean up after a Toomer’s Corner celebration.}

They’re calling it Unrolling Toomer’s. It is going to grow slowly, but there’s enthusiasm there. It requires garbage bags, a few yard tools, gloves and work, hard work.

As all good traditions, it has started informally, organically and by word of mouth. Unrolling Toomer’s is late Sunday mornings, or after church lets out, and you simply clean until you’ve had your share. Some picked a little, others cleaned up pounds of the stuff.

No one ran anyone off, and the cleaning company doesn’t mind the help. Unrolling Toomer’s started small, but there will be a few more volunteers on College Street next week. There will be more the time after that. One day there might be great crowds, hopefully including you, and perhaps big cheers. This should be as much of a celebration as rolling the corner.

After all, this is about the people. These particular good-natured people think it is great to be an Auburn Tiger.

family / history / photo / Thursday — 1 Comment
25
Aug 11

Family pictures

Had the chance for a quick family trip and, amidst the visiting, I got a few old pictures.

This is my mother’s father. He died just after I was born, and so I know him through stories and pictures. Hard to imagine your grandfather ever looked like this, isn’t it?

Here is his father, W.K., on the far left:

Now I have a picture (or a scan of a picture) of my great-grandfather as a child. The man next to W.K. is his father, W.J. , my great-great-grandfather.

W.J. was born in 1860 and died in 1948. He might have had memories of the Civil War, definitely Reconstruction and probably read all about World War II in his local paper. Based on W.K.’s birthday, you can put that photograph as circa 1910.

The above dates are from Tidwell’s The Frank and Jesse James Saga. The book changes the family narrative somewhat. Prior to researching that text for this post, the thought was that there was an adoptive relationship. But, the book has a written family history that indicates that W.J., the older man in the above picture, was a cousin of the James boys. W.J. was orphaned as an infant (his father died in a Civil War prison camp and his mother died soon after) and adopted by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Joshua James, was the uncle of Frank and Jesse James.

Moving a generation or two into the future, here’s a picture I’ve had for some time:

That very tall man young man in the background is my grandfather. The woman to his left is my grandmother. Their kids, my mother and uncle, are in the front center. The older couple are my mother’s father’s parents, my great-grandparents. My great-grandmother, on the far right, looked that way until the day she died four decades later. In 1995, she became the oldest ever graduate from the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters was the youngest graduate, in the 1960s.) My great-grandfather, the oldest gentleman in the picture above, is the kid on the far left of the previous, ancient picture.

On the other side of the family, here’s a picture of my maternal grandmother’s father:

That’s me on the right, and my cousin on the left. She’s all grown up, and has three kids who are now older than she is in that picture. I doubt she remembers him at all.

That building is still standing at my grandparent’s home. I have two or three scant memories of this great-grandfather, his home and the stories about others’ memories. Research on this side of the family isn’t as well developed, but can be traced back to a few family names I’ve never heard of elsewhere. Alas, there are no ties to outlaw folk heroes.

I love old pictures and the stories they whisper.

books / cycling / history / links / Thursday / video — Comments Off
18
Aug 11

Your average Thursday

Another day of fun and joy, and concerted attempts to maximize my time in the air conditioning. Not sure why, the heat index only made it up to 94 today. That’s a break around here at this time of year.

In a related story: It is August in the Deep South.

So I read and cleaned out inboxes and things like that. Took a trip to the local bike shop where The Yankee had to buy a new tire and tubes. I had to buy new tubes. Your paranoia grows incrementally with each additional ride you take without a spare.

Later in the day I stuffed my little bike bag full of the all-important things, CO2 cartridges, the extra tubes and so on, and hit the road for a brisk ride. It was the evening, it looked overcast and I was chasing the daylight. I got in 20 miles, dodging and weaving around traffic that has suddenly become a lot more dense (the college kids are back) and less accepting of cyclists (the college kids are back?). This could turn into a long lament about traffic and space and all of that, but it is a tired argument. I’m just going to make a custom jersey that says something like “You should move” and have an arrow pointing to the left.

Learned the power of the head shake this evening, though. I was stuck at an intersection and as the light was about to change I tried to clip back into my pedals. Just as I did this, leaning to the left, a car decided being behind me wasn’t as good as being beside me. I glanced back just far enough to see the hood and shook my head as I pedaled in front of him for the next 300 yards. Felt very European. That’ll show him!

I did some research, but it is far from over, meaning there are a lot of open tabs and windows on my computer.

I did this for fun. The Daily Show had a good run at class warfare tonight,

The Daily Show – World of Class Warfare – The Poor’s Free Ride Is Over
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes

So I looked up some stats. I picked 1980 at (almost) random. The percentage of U.S. households with:

Clothes washer: 73
Dishwasher: 38
Refrigerator: ~100;
Black and white television: 43
Color television: 88

That was in 1980. I picked the year since some insist on comparing President Obama with President Carter. Also, because of Lou Gannon‘s biography on President Reagan. In it, he noted that 4,414 individual tax returns with adjusted gross income of more than $1,000,000. In 1987 there were 34,944 such returns. During that time, Cannon observed, there was a huge increase in the purchase of small appliances and durable goods.

Critics of the new prosperity managed to remain unimpressed by the longest sustained economic recovery since World War II and the steady advance of American living standards. They viewed the Reagan years as an enshrinement of American avarice, epitomized by the “greed is healthy” speech of convicted Wall Street financier Ivan Boesky. Throughout most of the Reagan presidency the complaints of these critics were drowned out by the clamor of the marketplace.

A quarter of a century later, in 2005, these were the same categories, in percentages:

Clothes washer: 82.6, up nine percent
Dishwasher: 58.3, up 20 percent
Refrigerator: ~100, steady
Television: 99.8 percent
Cable TV: 79.1 percent, black and white is no longer listed
More than two TVs:at 42.9 percent

That’s U.S. Department of Energy data, used in a Heritage Foundation report, which also points out that 88.7 percent of American homes have a microwave and 84 percent have air conditioning?

What does it mean? You can decide that on your own. Should it reshape my position? Probably not. It should, however, make one realize that wealth, poverty, success, comfort and pain are relative. After all, the U.S. poverty line for a family of one is defined at $10,890. That income would put you in the 86th percentile on a global comparison according to Global Rich List. It is also longitudinal, and dovetails with class expectations: a very basic middle class lifestyle today would make you look like a king in your great-grandparents era.

Possessions aint everything^*, as the poet William Payne wrote, which brings us back to money for groceries and bills and pills. And that circular argument is where we’ve been politically for years. It’s almost enough to make the unassuming sort wonder why right-thinking people would ever get in that business^**.

^{* Air conditioning, I maintain, is pretty stinkin’ vital.}

^{** But you know better.}

history / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
18
Aug 11

Things to read

Why journalism remains a good major, as argued by a department chair and a third-generation journo:

If anything, (Chico State’s Susan Brockus Wiesinger) says, the skills the journalism program teaches—multiplatform writing and storytelling chief among them—are more in demand than ever before, and job opportunities abound.

Yes, she tells students, corporate daily newspapers are suffering mass layoffs, but the nation’s thousands of community newspapers are doing well, as are magazines. And the need for clearly and cleanly written content in other arenas—on the web, in business, on cable or broadcast television, in the public-relations field, and in many other areas—is growing rapidly.

When students ask her where they can find jobs, she has a one-word reply: “Everywhere.”

There are some generalities in those anecdotes, but I’d agree with the overall sentiment. I also appreciate this part of her argument:

When Wiesinger talks to incoming freshmen journalism students, she likes to ask them bluntly: “Why are you here?” She wants to learn whether they have passion for the profession—because of its importance to democracy, because of the teamwork required to practice it well, because reporting and writing vivid, meaningful stories is fun and exciting and never boring.

And she wants to encourage them, to make sure they know that by majoring in journalism they are going to learn skills that are invaluable in almost any profession and that will make them attractive to recruiters.

Chico State is a writing program, because they fear sending unprepared multimedia types out into the world. That’s the case with several of the more traditional programs. There’s no reason a department can’t prepare students with both the soft and the hard skills, and maybe even send them to computer science for a minor that will arm them for the future. That was the basis of a panel discussion we recently held at AEJMC.

But I digress.

Non-breaking non-news from Poynter, who reports that Cleveland.com (Disclosure: I once worked for a sister site) is accepting anonymous comments with open arms. (They’ve been doing this for a long time.) But the perspective is worth repeating as more and more newsrooms grow weary of dealing with the vitriole that can hide in anonymity.

“I think you miss out on the full extent of the [online] medium if you block out what readers have to say,” Cleveland.com Editor In Chief Denise Polverine told NetNewsCheck. “Some news organizations feel their voice is the final voice on a subject, and that’s not the case at Cleveland.com.” That’s not to say the comments are untouched. Moderators remove offensive ones, and on sensitive stories comments may be disabled entirely. A community manager writes a note about commenters when they attain “featured user” status and quotes something they’ve posted recently.

Does an “extraordinary situation” permit you to use someone else’s work without permission? The BBC seems to think so:

Social media editor Chris Hamilton clarifies that the organization’s policy is to “make every effort to contact people who’ve taken photos we want to use in our coverage and ask for their permission before doing so.” However, Hamilton noted, “where there is a strong public interest and often time constraints,” a senior editor may decide to “use a photo before we’ve cleared it.”

I’m sure the BBC bristles when this happens in the other direction, however. That’s essentially the argument that people like Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and others take about the news, that the paper (or other outlet) doesn’t “own” content, and that when it is out there, it is out there. Information, public domain and all of that.

And now that the shoe is on the other foot — even the BBC can’t be everywhere, so there’s the pro-am journalist solution — it will be interesting to see how this is accepted over time.

We’ve all had this kind of interview:

Ten social network settings you should check right away. These platforms don’t always default in the direction you’d like. Double-check your settings, just to be sure you’re showing and hiding what you’d like. I had to move a few settings over myself, here.

Cyberloafing is good for you:

“Employees who browse the web more end up being more engaged at work, so why fight that if it’s in moderation?” says Don J.Q. Chen, a researcher at the National University of Singapore and a co-author of the new report, presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management.

[…]

Chen says the web surfing provided the workers with “an instantaneous recovery.” “When you’re stressed at work and feel frustrated, go cyberloaf. Go on the net. After your break, you come back to work refreshed.”

I think the best part about this story is how Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan are relatable to audiences worldwide:

Armstrong was joined (in Afghanistan) by 83-year-old Jim Lovell, who famously commanded and rescued the botched Apollo 13 mission in 1970, and Gene Cernan, 77, who was the last man to set foot on the moon.

For Afghan trainee Lieutenant Khan Agha Ghaznavi, meeting “these great men who have actually been to the moon and could answer my questions directly… it’s overwhelming”.

That’s appeal.

When I was young, and at a summer day camp, I heard a speaker talk about his time drifting in the Pacific ocean. I don’t remember all of the details about his story, other than that he and his shipmates were in the sea for days, that their buddies were being picked off by the sharks and that they’d learned, through — trial and fatal error — the best way to stay afloat without attracting the attention of the predators.

For five days they struggled to survive. Some 900 men went into the water. Just 317 were rescued.

I remembered the name of the ship when I heard the story years later and after I’d become interested in the history of that era. It was during a re-watching of Jaws, where the ship captain tells the same tale. This fictional character and the real man we heard as children were both on the USS Indianapolis. They’d delivered the first atomic bomb to the Army Air Corps and were later hit by two Japanese torpedoes.

As dramatic stories go, they don’t become any more intense than this one. From start to finish — when the shipment began in 1945, to the court martial the captain face (he was the only U.S. captain that lost a boat in the war put on trial for it), to his being restored to active duty and his eventual 1949 retirement or even to the Japanese sub commander who said in 2000 “”I had a feeling it was contrived from the beginning” or to his Congressional exoneration later that same year — this is a sad and epic tale.

And now it will be a movie. Hope they play it straight up.