A full and busy day. Didn’t get home until 9 p.m. and there was baseball after that.
Led one class on data gathering. We talked about 990 forms and financial statements and online resources and text references and digging up story ideas from that sort of source material.
There was another class where we discussed broadcast writing and radio scripts.
Then I sat in on a bunch of interviews and all of that made the afternoon race by.
Which got a lot slower as soon as I got on the road. Two hours stuck behind this scene this evening:
It had been there for four hours before I got there and they weren’t close to having the roadway cleared by the time I inched through it.
At one point both lanes were closed, so there was a detour. And between the backup on the interstate, the other direction and the detour, they had 12 more wrecks. And one lane was shut down for more than eight hours.
A great big, rainy mess then. Hope everyone was OK — there was one injury reported — and that we all keep our sense of perspective while we’re stuck in a bad day of traffic.
Then baseball with friends. And now, I’m going to go fall asleep — pretty quickly, I’d imagine.
Another Wednesday, another full day. Class stuff in the morning, lunch, and then a class, which is immediately followed by another class. And then advertising phone calls and emails and faxes. (That’s how we upload.)
Then comes a few minutes to catch up on news and then student meetings. That’s followed closely by the newspaper critique, pictured below:
They are a swell group. Sharp, engaging, witheringly funny. They’re doing good journalism, too. If you need some promising young reporters, it turns out I know a few.
I saw this late last night and wanted to share it here today. If you’re an Auburn person, or a sports fan, you likely knew that Philip Lutzenkirchen died last year. I met him three or four times. (I don’t hang out with those guys or chase them down, but small town, BMOC and all that.) He was smart, handsome, talented, a nice fellow, well liked, respected by his peers and his fans. I wrote one of the first things about him, along those lines, after he died.
His profs liked him too, as a person and a student. (One of The Yankee’s colleagues wrote a nice piece about him, too.) Lutzie was coaching at a high school and looking forward to his next chapter when he died. A stupid, dumb tragedy that killed two boys, one a promising young man in college at Georgia and his friend, a guy just out of Auburn and a kid himself.
From that, though, comes this, which is one of the more courageous things I can imagine. His father spoke at that first hometown memorial. And he’s taken this on as a mission. Within just a few weeks of losing his oldest kid he was in locker rooms talking to high schoolers and college students. I saw him pick a kid out of the crowd, talk to him for a few moments and then send him out of the room. “And just like that, he can be gone.” Mike Lutzenkirchen sharing a raw, real, candid kind of message because, he figures, he’s filling the hole.
So here he’s talking to a room of high school athletes this week. It’s beautiful and hard and real. And kids should hear it, bad as it is for anyone to have to speak it from their own terrible personal experience.
And far be for it me to tell Mr. Lutzenkirchen how to tell his family’s story, he mentions the prom example in that speech, but he undersold it. From the Department of The Kids are Alright, comes perhaps the sweetest story you’ll find today.
The work on the campus cafeteria continues. The short version is they are renovating. And part of that renovation has involved gutting the center of the large room. So they had to erect an interior room, keeping the dust in and the food out. They built a dirty room, basically. They put in plexiglass windows so you can peer in and check out their work. I’m not sure if I’ve seen a lot of students doing that, but it is interesting to see what is happening inside on a weekly basis or so. On the outside, murals and other sanctioned graffiti are going up. Here’s some Seuss:
I didn’t know there was such a thing as a drywall truck, but it makes sense if you think about it. Problem is, I never have. Nevertheless, here you go:
Work, work, work. But it never seems enough, or finished. Hopefully it is good, at least.
I got in a fast 2,000 yards at the pool. Fast for me, that is. I was very pleased with myself because it took much less time in the aggregate. Let’s call that progress.
Pizza for dinner, a nice story involving a police officer around midday:
“I immediately started ripping apart the sink and the pipes. If you can only imagine losing your wedding ring – you can do anything with the adrenalin going through your body.”
The next thing she knew, other restaurant patrons joined her in the restroom. At one point, at least six people were in the bathroom trying to find the ring – in addition to those who just had to answer nature’s call.
They not only drew a crowd, they caught the attention of Hendrix who works an extra job at Al’s. Someone asked the kitchen staff for a long utensil, and Hendrix got curious. “The cop was like, ‘What the heck is going on?” Shannon said.
[…]
Hendrix may have sent Shannon on her way, but he certainly didn’t give up. He, along with the restaurant manager, called someone they thought could help. It was a small miracle, Hendrix said, when the trio heard the ring jingling somewhere deep down in the pipes.
But the officer’s work had only just begun. He didn’t know Shannon’s name, or the names of her friends. That’s when the detective work started.
One last thing, the man was an Alabama-native and a legend, and I thought he might live forever (mostly because, in my mind, he’s been about 70 for 25 years). But Percy Sledge’s passing should prompt you to check out at least a few of his live performances. The man was an incredible performer:
I saw him at a festival years ago, mostly because I remember a high school teacher of mine told me about the time she saw him in a blues bar in Mobile. He was singing that signature song, she said, and he did the chorus, “When a man loves a woman” 56 times. Always wanted to see something like that.
There’s a great vintage photo at the bottom of the post. First, here are a bunch of great links for you to check out, some of them neatly arranged by category.
I had her in a freshman class and you could tell, even then, how sharp and squared away she was. In the years since, she’s just begun to realize her great potential. It has been great fun to watch. (And, to her mother, I offer my joking apology and sincere congratulations.)
You might have seen her on ESPN, or if you’ve been in any of my classes or just like a great story, but the women’s college basketball player that captured our imagination last year has died. The local CBS affiliate produced a beautiful obit, which, really, was about how she lived: Lauren Hill (1995-2015). A beautiful young woman, a young life, well-lived, but far too briefly.
The story behind a Mountain Brook businessman’s prized Frederic Remington painting that has been appraised for $600,000 to $800,000 just got even more intriguing.
The director of the Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y, said Tuesday that she has discovered the nearly 120-year-old painting of Mountain Brook real-estate executive Ty Dodge’s great-grandfather was obtained by Dodge’s family in a 1938 exchange that left the museum with two forged Remington pieces in return.
You have to pay close attention to that story to follow it — or I did, at least — but it is a great story for those that like museums, family heirlooms, art or misidentified forgeries.
We traveled. Uber to the airport. Delta from Tampa to Atlanta. A shuttle from the airport to the car. And then the car down the freeway home. All of that so I could take off my suit and then mow the lawn just ahead of the rain. And now this, catching up, with extra photos from the trip.
This is the first of the electronic waiter pagers I’ve seen. It was in the hotel lobby, a place with big palm trees, no apparent ceiling and a pretty decent music selection. I wanted to press one of the buttons to test the response time, but then I would have to order something …
And that would have been silly considering how much of our dining was done during the trip at the Colombia Cafe. It is located in one of the city’s museums, sort of a welcome center location. And above us there was great neon, like this guy:
I wanted to bring the baseball player sign home. The airline said no. Maybe I should have taken the train:
And now some of the great ceramic work adorning the outside of the Colombia, in Ybor City. Fine detail, terrific food. I’d go back again — oh wait! We did!
