As you might have heard, there were deadly tornadoes across the South on Sunday. At least two people in Alabama were killed. As always, the tragedy could have been much more costly, despite the devastation of property. There were, experts now say, at least six twisters in Alabama. The fatalities were low because of the excellent and hard work of the National Weather Service and the local meteorologists.
Only ABC did not get that memo:
ABC 33/40 meteorologist James Spann — the best in the business and there’s no discussion on this — took his national network to task. He suggested Diane Sawyer “get a clue” and challenged her to a debate on the issue. His audience were also indignant, writing first on the local site and then at the ABC homesite, where the chastising grew even louder. Those comments are worth a read.
We live in a dangerous area when it comes to spring weather. December and January are dangerous here too. Storms fall out of the sky. Tornadoes flare up and destroy property and sometimes take lives, but the technology and science now allow meteorologists to give days worth of advance warning. Forecasting that was not available a generation ago saves untold numbers of lives every year.
And so Spann took umbrage. His colleagues at KATV in Arkansas, where other tornadoes touched down, did too.
After today’s social media uproar ABC News decided to interview Spann today. It was scheduled and then canceled and rescheduled. Somewhere in there ABC had to stoop to spinning their own newscast:
“The report that aired Monday was referring to the fact that many families were surprised because they were asleep when the tornado hit in the middle of the night,” an ABC spokesperson says. “‘World News’ will cover the latest on the aftermath of the tornadoes tonight and will clarify the warning and advance forecasts given.”
Not even especially good spin, but there it was all the same.
Their newscast this evening?
Spann wrote on his site that he was grateful for the interview and that the important message about the outdoor sirens was shared, but …
There was no apology, or mention of the botched story yesterday when Diane Sawyer said the pre-dawn tornadoes Monday were a “surprise” with “no warning”. A little odd how you just go from that one day, to a story on how good the warning process was the next day. But, I am not a journalist and maybe that is just the way you do it. Seems strange. I would imagine Diane actually didn’t write that copy, but she will probably think twice about fact checking on lead story intros.
[...]
My frustration with the situation yesterday is shared by ALL of those hard working people involved in the warning process. The National Weather Service, the EM community (emergency managers), and broadcast meteorologists. I felt that these people were devalued and insulted yesterday.
It has been an interesting day in local-national media.
The storms missed us entirely, all going far north. We had some much needed rain and that’s all. We’ll get some more later this week, hopefully without the storms. I’m sure ABC hopes that’s the case.
Beautiful day today. I got in a 26 mile ride at a nice, even 15 mile per hour pace. Now let’s see if I can do that again tomorrow.
Got a lot of work done otherwise, and made a handful of phone calls. More work tomorrow, more emails and reading and some time on the bike. We’re expecting 72-degrees tomorrow for the first time this year. Of course I’ll be riding …
Today, I decided, would be the day that I would fix a few things that need fixing.
I should have picked a different day.
So I set out to Walmart, where they have many things I don’t need, but exactly one of the things I do need. (One thing I need but could not get at the store: batteries. This should have been the signal to go do something else, anything else.)
But I did find a specific headlight bulb. The gentleman working in automotive had to unlock the bulb — which cost $7.88 — from the display hook. The cardboard, he said “has some sort of security device in it.”
They’re like currency on the inside.
He did not laugh, and so we know he doesn’t watch movies set in prisons. He was a very nice guy. I’d picked the wrong bulb and he patiently explained the difference between the two and then had to unlock the proper bulb. I learned more about halogen in one box store conversation than I’d ever thought possible.
They did not have the other things I needed, so I returned home to improve my headlight situation. Only I can’t, because I drive a Nissan, which means to get to the headlight you have to go through the wheel well.
There are three rivets that must be removed from the wheel well — and, truly, if you find instructions for headlights beginning with “Turn the wheel all the well to the right” just stop. When you’ve removed the rivets you must pull out a screw that attaches the wheel well from the bumper.
I’m changing a headlight.
You peel back the wheel well. From there you crane your neck, turn your flashlight to anti-gravity mode so it floats in just the right spot and, well, good luck.
This is where the directions diverged from my car’s reality. And I can’t take the entire plastic light globe off. This is important because I have some fancy 24th century headlight that requires a perfectly dry operating environment — because they are more efficient — or it kills the bulb. And my globe has moisture in it. So I have to take it to someone to fix.
I called a dealership about this, and the polite word for this procedure is extortion.
So I put the wheel well back inside the bumper, reapply the screw holding the two together and then insert the three rivets to their mounted position. I turned the wheel back to the standard position and went to the hardware store.
Imagine walking into a place with saws and drills and drywall putty with this playing over the speakers:
I did find the sink repair kit. We have a slow drip in the kitchen. If you hop on one foot and the wind is blowing out of the northwest you can find a sweet spot and stop the leak. Otherwise you’re going to hear a drop of water every so often.
I pick up the set of springs, washers and other things. Having watched a video, and read the instructions, I’m confident this is a quick fix, somewhere in the easy category.
I find the batteries I need that Walmart did not have. I check out.
I return home to the dripping sink and assemble my tools. The first step is to remove the handle from the rest of the apparatus. One allen wrench later and the handle is in the sink. Success! Now the cap assembly must come off so that we can find the parts that need to be replaced.
The cap assembly will not come off. It seems that the water has fused one piece of metal to another. Twisting, turning, banging, spinning, muttering, nothing would set the thing free. I torqued it so hard that I could turn the entire faucet assembly from the sink. This is where you hear your parents voices in your head: Don’t force it.
So the repair kit is going back to the store and I’ll just blame my impressively hard water and the curse of whatever spirits we’ve angered that live on this property. If you’re keeping score:
Thermostat
Shower head
Refrigerator
Dishwasher
Dishwasher again
Cable, multiple times
Garage door button
Air conditioner contact
Two separate minor plumbing issues
The sink of doom
We’ve lived here 17 months.
Finally, I replaced the battery in the key fob to my car. There’s a telltale in the dash that tells you when the battery is low. This is a precise operation. In fact, operation is a good term, because you need to work in a completely sterile environment and operate your Fulcrumbot 6000 with a precise caliper measurement to remove and replace the batter. And, I guess also because my car is a Nissan, it requires a battery that merely glancing at with human eyes “significantly reduces the battery’s charge.”
Having separated the fob, prying free the dying battery and maneuvering the new battery into place with a complex series of electromagnetic acrobatics, I have gotten at least one item off the list. Go out to the car, crank the engine and … the low battery telltale is still on.
Also, I received my third piece of correspondence telling me that I wouldn’t be paid for an article I wrote last year. For a publisher that is apparently shirking their responsibilities while going out of business they certainly are prolific.
The tornado ripped the roof and wall off of half of the the Snider’s home, including their baby’s room. He credits the siren with saving their lives, particularly his daughter’s life.
“If that siren had not gone off, my baby would have been gone,” he said. “The crib was still there, but it sucked the sheets off of it.”
Lucky guy. You aren’t supposed to depend on those outdoor sirens as a warning — they aren’t designed for indoor alarms or to wake up people in the middle of the night, but are rather intended to get people back inside to safety — but Charles Snider will never live out of earshot of one.
An email conversation spent me on a late evening genealogy search. My known family tree only goes back so far, it seems. Some people aren’t interested in doing the research. We have common names. We are from a typically inconspicuous rural lifestyle, so there aren’t a lot of newspaper mentions.
I haven’t done any real genealogy research, the extent of my primary searches have come from old digitized newspaper copy, but I do enjoy digging through the hard, good work of others.
So in this conversation today I realized there were names I’d forgotten and names I couldn’t recall ever knowing. I started searching. I got back an extra generation and found two new surnames. I also found the obituary of my great-great grandfather. He was a World War I draftee, and died in his home. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.
These were the ads on the obituary page of The Alabama Courier (Athens, Ala.) on Thursday, February 28, 1946. (The Courier was established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969. They’ve been publishing as the News Courier since.)
Miss your loved ones? Bury yourself in work! The nuts and bolts of the Army Air Corps will see you through! The coveralls are free, but you’ll earn the stripes.
This is from the Ads You Don’t See Anymore department of the newspaper:
I couldn’t find any mention of the Clem Brothers Gin, but I’ll ask around. The closest thing I can find is a lumber concern over in Georgia.
Ahhh, a glamorous night out on the town. You’ve put on your best coat, your wife is wearing that beautiful dress. And the maitre’ de can set you up at the best table! “We’ll take the milk. Christopher’s.”
“Garçon! This is from a different dairy. Please take it back.”
I can’t figure out if this was the local logo or something that died out before the muscle car era, but here’s the Dodge ad:
A man named Robert Mills had worked at Draper Motor Company for about a year when this ad came out. After a decade on the lot he bought the dealership in 1955. It stayed open at least until he retired, in 1979. Can’t find anything about the place after that.
The Plaza Theater was on the square in neighboring Athens:
The movie, West of Pinto Basin, was released six years before, in 1940. My how the world changed in between. The IMDB blurb for the movie: “Three cowboys fight a saloon owner who is trying to grab up all the local land by engineering stagecoach robberies so an irrigation dam can’t be built.”
Can’t miss, right? It is a durable plot. Shows up in a lot of westerns.
Here’s the Zorro serial, in full:
Three people are killed and a stagecoach crashes off a cliff into a creek in the story’s first two minutes, before the first word is spoken. They do a great cliffhanger at the end of the episode, too. (You can watch the entire story at the Internet Archive.
And, yes, the title says Zorro, but the character is Black Whip. Released in 1944, the serial was meant to capitalize off of a 20th Century Fox remake of The Mark of Zorro. Republic couldn’t get Zorro, and so this was how they solved the problem. (See? Hollywood has been out of ideas before.) The serial is set in Idaho and the main theme is a fight to prevent and ensure statehood by the villains and heroes respectively. You wonder if other territories had other Zorro spinoff franchisees. A different color, a different weapon and some hero could pay a few royalties to the Big Z and save the day, and probably a few Hollywood production companies, too.
One last thing on the Zorro serial: James Lileks a theory that projects from this period always have a Star Trek tie. So I ran the entire cast and crew through the Star Trek filter — it zooms along at warp speed don’t ya know … — and found exactly one match. Tom Steele was a stuntman on Black Whip. He started in 1932 and worked until the mid-1980s. He appeared in Bread and Circuses as Slave #2. He has the best stuntman bio ever:
Stuntmen are often selected because of their resemblance to the star they are doubling for. In contrast to this, many of Republic Pictures’ western stars in the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Allan Lane, Bill Elliot, Rex Allen and Monte Hale, were selected in part due to their resemblance to Steele, who would do their stunts.
The Added Joy? It was a cartoon short from 1937, back when Mel Blanc was uncredited.
But I digress. The Plaza opened in 1939 and sat 340 people. (The city itself had about 4,300 at the time.) In 1954 a newspaper ad said the theatre would be closed temporarily starting in June, but it never reopened.
Here’s where the theater stood:
Last year, the Courier reported that a non-profit community organization that prettifies the downtown area asked the current owner of the building, a pharmacist, to improve the façade of the old theater. The dilapidated stucco came down, the brick underneath was still in good condition.
BABY CHICKS – The KIND THAT LIVE. As opposed to the chicks that, you know, die.
It verily screams out at you on the obits page.
Anyway. In my paternal grandfather’s family I gained an extra generation — Smith’s are tough to trace at a casual glance — dating back to my great-great-grandfather.
Now, my paternal grandfather’s mother? She told me when I was very young about some uncles who fought in the Civil War. I was young enough to be enthralled by this, but not smart enough yet to ask if she knew any details. If she were still here I might be able to tell her a few things after this bit of reading.
It was her father’s obituary we started discussing here. I picked up a thread on rootsweb that allows me to go back 13 more generations. Assuming these various people’s hard work is correct (I see a few logic errors in chronology in some peripheral details, but let’s assume the big stuff is accurate) we can go back to a man named Eltekens, in 16th century Midwolda, Groningen, Netherlands.
The Hendrix, again I didn’t even know this name until today, came over to the New World in 1662. (In my mother’s family a young man came over on the Mayflower, so my roots are fairly deep, it seems.) Albertus Hendrickssen became Albert Hendricks. He was a house carpenter, owned land in Pennsylvania and was a constable and a juror.
This would have been his land around the turn of the 18th century:
Albert’s particular son that matters to this story, Johannes (or John), was a shipbuilder. His second wife extends the chain a bit closer to my family. He had two children in Philadelphia before dying in 1709. It was John’s son, James, that moved the family south. He found himself in North Carolina in the early 1740s. He had nine sons and “several unknown daughters as he left no will.”
James Jr. changed Hendricks to Hendrix. He is believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War. James Jr.’s son Larkin moved the family to Alabama in 1830 or earlier.
Larkin’s son, William, and grandson, Joseph, lived through the Civil War — though I don’t know if they fought. Joseph also read about World War I and the Great Depression in the local paper. He was a farmer, and he died in 1933 at the age of 88. His son was James, the World War I draftee, my great-great-grandfather at the beginning of this post.
At least one branch of my family tree has been in that county for nine generations and 180 years. It’s only been a county for 196 years. (They should really own more property given this information.)
All of this is more than you wanted, of course. But when you do this sort of thing it is good to write it down and make good sense of it all. That way you can bore your friends endlessly at parties.
Don’t spend too much time trying to understand what is going on here, just let it soak all in. The first thing you’ll want to notice is how great Kirk Sampson is in dealing with the media. Good thing, that’s his job and all. The second thing is how ESPN, CBS et al fall all over themselves to … fall all over themselves.
That link is a selection of the emails Sampson fielded from media during the 2010 Auburn national championship and manufactured Cam Newton scandal. Deadspin asked for the emails, and the forensic analysis began the moment the university complied:
ESPN’s Joe Schad and Sampson have the following exchange in which the former pronounces himself “so jacked,” pimps his own Twitter feed, and generally expresses himself in such a way that it’s difficult to tell the reporter from the flack.
[...]
Our scare-quoting TV person is back, still determined to show Cam Newton taking his “softer side” for a spin around a local elementary school. He writes: “Possible pitch to Cam: When people see ‘high-profile’ folks giving back, it might encourage them to do the same….” (And thus did the flack get flacked.)
I shared a joke with a friend of mine, a prominent journalism professor, that he was close to mistaking sports reporting for journalism. Universities — intent on controlling their message and protecting their student-athletes — need to control their message, and generally do a great job of it. It is surprising they don’t go it alone more often. Consider: they have a devoted audience, multi-million dollar TV deals and the same dissemination tools as you or I. And yet there is always ESPN, playing kingmaker and empire destroyer almost within the same series of emails.
Deadspin may have captured the moment perfectly in two sentences. “This is how sports scandals unfold now. ESPN creates and amplifies the controversy from which ESPN alone can provide the safe haven.” The local guys were far more decent about the thing.
Read that link. It will all make sense.
I’m so gladthis expression has become acceptable for use in headlines. The comments, as a joy, are the state’s pride and treasure.
We often talk about juxtaposition in a news design sense. This is now the best example ever. It was discovered by Napo, former classmate of mine, who went on to be a great designer and program developer.
It’s quite easy, really. You don’t even need any heavy equipment. In 1988 the Ostry family in Nebraska wanted to move their barn to higher ground.
Ostry’s son Mike showed his father some calculations. He had counted the individual boards and timbers in the barn and estimated that the barn weighed approximately 16,640 pounds. He also estimated that a steel grid needed to move the barn would add another 3,150 pounds, bringing the total weight to just under 10 tons.
The next step is to gather about 350 of your best friends and invite them to come lift your barn. The video shows the result.
They should show that video at team-building conferences.
Almost two dozen years ago 344 men and women moved that barn by hand. I wonder how the building and the family are doing these days.
