If you have never been to Savannah — or if you’re only now planning a trip because you’ve read about it in this space or if you’ve never been to this particular place — do yourself a favor and go to lunch at Mrs. Wilkes. Go early in your trip, because you will want to go back.
Don’t even worry about Paula Deen’s place. This is better and you’re welcome.
Under our tree, where we always spend our last afternoon before leaving town. We spent a day under this tree on our first trip here in 2005. We got engaged under this tree a few years later. This is the view I had while working up the nerve:
A guy walked by, one of the panhandling welcome committee members, and offered to take our picture:
The Yankee composes a terrific photograph similar to the view I shared above:
On River Street, where few tourists are to be found even on this beautiful Friday, there was a busker:
Who doesn’t love a good busker? This guy sang a capella all weekend. Just him, his hands, his money bucket and a bottle of water. You could hear him a block away. Sounded great, too.
And back home we drove. We’d been reading all day about all of the terrible senselessness that had taken place in Newtown, just 20 miles from where The Yankee grew up.
Meanwhile, police found the bodies of a woman and two kids in a small apartment just a few miles from my campus. So there I am, middle of the night, driving through the countryside and calling media relations people, editors, police departments and the campus safety office, trying to make sure that this had no Samford ties. Seems it did not.
Covering that during the semester break would be a challenge. I’m sure our students would have done a respectful job. Wish you saw more of that from Connecticut out of cable television today. There’s been far too much misinformation and misidentification (problems originating with overwhelmed law enforcement agencies) alongside conjecture and quacks that have been shuffled in front of the cameras (strictly the media’s fault). But all of that belongs in a different rant.
As of this writing they are up to 26 fatalities there. It is hard to all of this, so sweeping and terrible in its scope and consequence. There’s precious little peace and even less understanding, I’m sure.
I think of the voids, the big hole in the community that stands out for years in a wide tragedy. I think of all of the little empty places found in all of those families when someone is so unexpectedly pulled away. That lasts for generations.
Found this on one of our local merchant’s Facebook page:
If you would like to mail sympathy cards or letters of support to the school, the address is:
Dave Brubeck, who invented the notes that landed between the things that you don’t play that mean you’re making jazz, recently died. Everyone that is knowledgeable about his importance to music can talk far more about this than I can.
But someone found footage of a concert he performed at Samford in the 1980s. Not sure why it is in black and white. Just enjoy the show:
Since I mentioned Bo Jackson yesterday … The War Eagle Reader asked me to write a little preview of the 30 for 30 on him, which debuts tomorrow. I had the chance to watch it last night:
The first story is from retired baseball coach Hal Baird, “I saw Bo jump over a Volkswagon.”
The second story, the one about Jackson standing in thigh-high water and doing a standing back flip, is from one of his coaches at McAdory High School. I’ve heard that one from a few different people that fit in that period of Jackson’s young life.
There’s the story about Jackson throwing a football up to the scoreboard before the Sugar Bowl. Randy Campbell told me that one himself.
Dickie Atcheson, his high school football coach, talks about Jackson using a pole vault pole designed for 180-pounders. Bo cleared 13 feet at 215 pounds.
There’s another story where he literally destroyed a batting cage in front of the top scout for the New York Yankees. In high school. With one hit.
Baird didn’t mention the story about hitting three home runs into the lights at Georgia as a freshman. No one told the story about the home run he hit that carried halfway over the football field. The one about when he came back to the high school after his hip replacement. He was still faster than everyone, including the kid that would capture most of his high school records.
Bo Jackson was amazing:
Bo Jackson is amazing. Always will be.
I only wish the documentary covered Bo Bikes Bama. Because HE SCARED TORNADOES OUT OF THE STATE.
You Don’t Know Bo was directed by Michael Bonfiglio (you can read TWER’s interview with him here). It premieres on ESPN on Dec. 8th at 9 p.m.
music / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Caledonia Soul music | Tell me what it is 4 Dec 12
I worked with students. I had a critique meeting with the newspaper staff. We discussed how we managed to leave an entire question, ‘Why?’ out of a story.
But at least we managed to reference something from 1939 in that piece which didn’t really matter much at all to the story today. Z has now happened, which was a logical conclusion of X, which brought about Y. And now here’s a tale of B, C and D.
That’s the way of it sometimes.
I told one funny story. I worked on this for much of the afternoon:
I had a headache and various other aches. This hurt and that hurt and my shoulder was bothering me for no reason at all and my collar bone was weird and on and on. Pretty rough for most of the day. By the evening I was in a foul mood of my own creation and for no good or real reason.
So I watched Memorial Day, which was what a movie that’s not trying to be a movie might look like.
This is interesting. Here is the trailer from the movie’s distributor:
And here is the trailer, YouTube says, “From the actual filmmakers. Not the distributors.”
I wonder what brought that on. Which of these movies would you rather see?
If you like the Cromwells, this movie is worth seeing. Everyone else is just holding serve, but that’s OK. When your film is about a flashback within a flashback the leads are running the show anyway.
I watched the Jackson Browne DVD, Going Home, but it didn’t fit my mood.
So I soothed myself with Meat Loaf:
Tomorrow will be better. Has to be more delightful than this one.
Everybody has them, some are better than others. Some can be told to illustrate a point. Some can be told just to be told. I try not to share too many “war stories” in class because they are usually disturbing or pointless or sound like bragging. But I told some stories today. It is a trip down memory lane for me, some of these things I’d all but forgotten.
Once I was called on my off day to go stand outside in the bitter, freezing cold and watch a hostage standoff. Seems a man and a woman had gotten into a fight. He displayed a knife. She got out of their house, but the three kids were stuck inside. I remember stamping my feet for warmth, wishing for a bigger jacket, watching the SWAT team rehearse down the block and then this kid, maybe seven or eight, dangling from a window in his home. It was just a bit too high for him and he was having trouble letting go. There was a police officer in body armor right under the window and he was reaching to get the kid and his shirt was riding up and then he was on the wrong, in the officer’s arms and being trotted away. All the kids got out safely and we reported from there for the better part of a day.
Not every story is a happy one, of course.
I talked about the guy so cranked out on drugs that he used the toddler in his arms as a weapon to ward off police officers. I always thought watching the police sit on their cruisers crying after that was the best part of the story.
Sometimes, I say a lot about any format, the story is about timing. You turn away, you miss it. You leave early, arrive late, you miss it. Really talented reporters can see everything, hear of everything and are apparently everywhere. Or at least they can make it seem like that. For mere mortals, chance plays into it.
I think I was just driving by when I saw a big scene in this one apartment complex. Stopped in there to find out a police officer had just been shot. Jack Cooper was his name, I remember that a decade later. The guy he was dealing with was worried about vampires and demons and pepper spray didn’t bother him. Somehow he got Cooper’s weapon and got off a shot before being killed himself. That was a pretty neighborhood, and I stood around those cruisers and ambulances for hours talking to and about the neighbors. I got back to the studio that day and received probably the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten professionally. I described things with words, someone whom I greatly respected said, better than the television cameras did.
I didn’t talk today about covering stories where babies were found in the garbage or molested dogs or bodies found in car washes on Christmas morning. Some of that stuff is too depressing.
So we talked about broadcast news writing today, from which I have several years of stories and experience to draw. Some of my best writing was probably done in a studio somewhere, rewriting something I’d written three times before because I needed to get three more seconds cut from the source time. Perhaps nothing makes a print writer a stronger writer than considering the broadcast style.
Of course perhaps two-thirds of this class was interested in public relations, but still. The lesson plan called for broadcasting, so that’s what we talked about.
I miss it, but only a little. I don’t miss being at work at 4 a.m. Don’t miss that at all. That was my last broadcasting job. When I went online in 2004 and that job called for me to show up at 6 a.m. I thought I’d really earned a step up in life.
Now I stay on campus all night watching students put their newspaper together so, really, I’ve finally found the night owl schedule my circadian rhythms have always demanded.
I don’t have quite the same pool of war stories, because our campus is a beautiful little serene place and I now tell tales of improper pronouns and misspelled building names and warning off plagiarism, but it is a great tradeoff.
And now a very mellow tune performed on a frozen pond that, beyond the name, has absolutely nothing to do with the Joe Walsh standard:
I like the kitchen shots. They’re cute.
That is a band about which you can find little information, called Eden’s Empire. On their Bandcamp page they write:
This is an anthem for hope.
We are the sound of Jimi Hendrix strapped to the front of a run-away freight train with Dylan feeding the fire.
We are not rock stars. We’re not selling sex, angst, or anarchy. We’re giving away songs about how hard it is for our generation to find love, purpose, and truth in a world that just wants us to buy more of what put our parents in this situation.
We are over educated, underpaid, and unsatisfied.
We are James Dean with a guitar.
We are twenty something’s and we’re restless.
Hurricanes, diplomas, love, and big ideas have pulled us from all corners of the country and dropped us together in the Midwest.
We have no money, no map, and no desire to just dream anymore.
We are on an odyssey, we don’t know what were looking for, but so far all we’ve found is rock n’ roll.
The share of Americans living in multigenerational households reached the highest level since the 1950s, after rising significantly over the past five years, according to Pew.
In the never-ending quest for story ideas and opportunities to prove my entrepreneurial prescience I am always looking for a hook or an angle. And, forgive me if this is just the Ken Burns talking …
But I think there’s some modern John Steinbeck story waiting to emerge. This being a tectonic type of tale on the scale of ultimate stories. Of course there will be WiFi and cable television and hipsters and even more politics this time around, but there might be something to it.
I rambled on here for awhile about Franklin Roosevelt, James Bond and YouTube propaganda. Those paragraphs didn’t add much and I discovered the delete button still works; you’re welcome.
It started out, though, with the idea that the Dust Bowl changed a lot of lives, not just in the short term, but generationally. People who lived in Oklahoma moved to California or Arizona, if they were lucky enough to get in, or back east and they had children and grandchildren and those people live in those places, or at least started in those places and where are they now and what got them there? These are the plates of life, right? So I say it is tectonic. I look at my family history and wonder what were the reasons they moved down from the mountains? I found several strands of the tree that ventured to Texas or Oklahoma, probably be cause they knew a cousin there who told them times were good and your parents aren’t here, anyway. And what prompted them to go there?
If you spend time in one of the genealogy books of my extended family you find they came from Germany in the early 18th century. It is written somewhere that generally people of that place and era moved to recapture something in a new place. Then, according to this family book, some of those particular people fought in Pennsylvania regiments in “the Sectional War” and later moved to north Alabama in the 1880s. The why is left to your imagination.
Another side of my family moved down from Tennessee before the Civil War. They were in a part of the state that typically stayed out of the war and some of the young men finally only joined up when the Union all but pressed them into service.
This is all in my mother’s family. On the Smith side of things, well the Smiths are hard, but I found an old newspaper mention early this year that led me to a new name on a genealogy site which led all the way back to the Netherlands in the 16th century. Those people moved to North Carolina before the Revolutionary War, and eventually worked into Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma, probably just in time for the Dust Bowl.
They, like the other branch in the book above, were all just farmers for the most part, poor in a hardscrabble world during a challenging time. The whys died with them, but they are probably straightforward and logical. Or fantastical beyond belief. Maybe life was good to them. Who knows what war stories they had?
