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Indiana / memories / photo / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on The cuffs were stained, and it got stinky
16
Feb 17

The cuffs were stained, and it got stinky

From time to time a student asks to interview me about something or other as part of a class project. I try to be a difficult interview, thinking maybe the word will get out and people will stop asking.

I don’t actually act like a bad interview subject. I try to be helpful while they’re learning their craft, but the thought always occurs to me: I could derail this. I could send this off in an entirely different direction. But they’re going to get that experience soon enough.

Today I got interviewed as part of a magazine writing exercise about the importance of clothes. It seemed an unusual topic, what clothes are important to you. So I thought, for whatever reason, about outerwear. This jacket, that coat and so on. I guess because it has been cold, I was thinking of the things that help keep you warm. Somewhere in there I mentioned this old denim jacket I had as a kid. Denim, which has made a comeback once more, was a big status symbol back then. And of course the interviewer seized on this as her topic.

I didn’t have a denim jacket for the longest time, because they were expensive and we didn’t have that kind of money. But finally, for Christmas one year, I got one. It was, I told my interviewer, an off-brand and it was probably about 15 minutes after denim was the thing, but I loved it. Loved it. I wore that jacket constantly. Day, night, overnight. And I suppose I just eventually physically outgrew it. But I remember the joy of the gift and the smell of the jacket. And it wasn’t a good smell, because I wore it constantly and I was a little boy. My mom had to wait until I went to sleep and then took the jacket off of me to wash the thing.

The interviewer asked good questions, as I imagined she would. Made me really think of my answers. It became an almost psychological exercise.

Afterward, I sent my mom a text, telling her about this interview. I figured she’d have a funny anecdote for me that I could pass along to my interviewer and we’d all have a good laugh. She didn’t remember the jacket.

In her defense, it was a few decades ago.

Also, when I was little, The Count always scared me. (I was a sensitive child.) But Brielle doesn’t have this problem. Plus, she’s adorable, and knows her stuff:

In the studio this evening, the sports show took over. David and Griffin are going places:

We’ll get to say we knew them back when. They do such great work. But you could say that about a lot of people around here.

And this:

IU / journalism / memories / photo / running / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on A little something for a lot of people
15
Feb 17

A little something for a lot of people

Here’s your mid-week upside down motivation, brought to you by Allie The Black Cat:

She’s always concerned about morale, now if only she could read, so she’d know the words were upside down.

She spends enough time staring at screens and books and paper. Maybe she thinks she can read. Maybe she just looked at that upside down. Maybe I’m the one that is wrong. Maybe she actually can read. Anything is possible, it says.

We went for a run late this evening, before it was time to head back into the studio. I thought we would be running indoors, so I just had shorts and a t-shirt. But we ran outside, where the windchill was 34 degrees. I am smart. So I got in five miles before I had to cut it short to go back to work. I didn’t get my full eight, but I did get this view after I showered and set out to walk back to my building:

That’s going to be a banner on the site one day soon, I think.

These two pictures are from last night. The news show I oversee now has a weather segment. This was from last night, when we finally broke in the green screen. Pretty cool opportunity for the folks studying the weather:

I spent some time in the control room last night, too. Mostly because there are a lot of lights and cool buttons in there:

Things to read … Here by the owl:

CADIZ, Ohio — Don Jones supports students as an FFA adviser, represented by the owl during FFA meetings.

In FFA tradition, the owl is a time-honored emblem of knowledge and wisdom, and Jones has served in the adviser’s role for 22 years. Some of his students jokingly refer to him as the “wise old owl.”

In his classroom at Harrison Central Junior and Senior High School, he provides real lessons for real life as the agricultural education teacher. He sees 140 students a day, in grades 7-12.

Being the only educator in the program, with just one classroom, he has to turn away students from his program, which is an elective for the nearly 650 youth at Harrison Central.

That headline is no accident. That’s actually part of the opening ceremony the FFA uses at levels ranging from school meetings to the national convention. The teacher, or the adviser, is represented by the owl.

Last year I wrote about my advisors:

I had many valuable experiences, and this could go on and on, but the most important thing the FFA gave to me was the leadership of two good men. Mr. Swaffield and Mr. Caddell were battle-tested teachers. They are two solid, stand up, good, decent, morally upright father figures I benefitted from as a teenager, when a boy needs them most.

Scott Pelley, Lester Holt, David Muir: The Unprecedented Joint Interview:

And, finally: Lost songs of Holocaust found in University of Akron archives:

In the summer of 1946, the psychologist interviewed at least 130 Jewish survivors in nine languages in refugee camps in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. With a wire recorder — then considered state-of-the-art equipment — and 200 spools of steel wire, Boder preserved some of the first oral histories of concentration camp survivors. He also recorded song sessions and religious services.

A portion of Boder’s work has been archived at The University of Akron’s Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology since 1967. But it wasn’t until a recent project to digitize the recordings got under way that a spool containing the “Henonville Songs,” performed in Yiddish and German and long thought lost, was discovered in a mislabeled canister.

As I’ve said before: A significant portion of the 21st century is going to go toward the preservation of the works of the 20th.

Friday / music / video — Comments Off on Jo Stafford sings stuff for us
10
Feb 17

Jo Stafford sings stuff for us

Sometime after I discovered big band music I really discovered Jo Stafford. She had the most divinely studio voice. A pure, opera-trained soprano and what they called a natural falsetto. Sultry and enchanting and she somehow always seemed to keep her distance from you, too. Even as you thought, if you squinted real hard and you imagined this was an old fuzzy AM radio and you weren’t always in such a climate-controlled environment that the “you” in her songs just might, in fact, be you.

Well.

Today I was looking for something else and I discovered that in 1961 Stafford and her husband were in London. They produced a nine-show series there. (There was a variety show in the U.S. in the 1950s) And I discovered that the great Ella Fitzgerald did a medley with Stafford.

Can you even?

Yes, you can:

Fitzgerald was the first black musician to win a Grammy. She’d win 12 more and sale more than 40 million records. Stafford had a Grammy. And midway through her career she was tapped as the best-selling female singer in the world.

Now, 1940s Jo Stafford is my favorite. By the time she was making the rounds on television she was in her mid-30s and on. Here she is with Bing Crosby in 1959 and it is incredible, but the whimsy of youth is replaced with the confidence that comes with well-earned wisdom. The one-liners come with their own answers and have a little skepticism and acid in them:

She’s able to not be overwhelmed by Bing, and he was kind enough to let her stay up there where she belonged.

This is 15 years previous, in a 1944 movie. She had six top 20 hits that year. She would have been 27 or 28 then, and The Pied Pipers had been working on these tight harmonies for about six years. She had no idea of the complete arc of her career then:

Because here’s Jo Stafford in the 1970s … she’d been doing a parody act for a long time with her husband. That was where her Grammy came from, a 1960s comedy record. She had what might have been one of the first alter-egos in pop music. “Darlene Edwards” was a hapless lounge act sort. And this was a 1979 hit:

Hard to reconcile that this is the same voice. This was her biggest hit:

Not hard to see why.

IU / photo / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off on What’s in the middle? Eh, there was a cookie at the end
9
Feb 17

What’s in the middle? Eh, there was a cookie at the end

Thursdays … where do they go? I’m really not sure. They start here and end there and stuff surely happens in between, but a lot in the middle doesn’t seem to stand out for some reason. Strange.

On the one-block walk from the parking deck to the office this morning, I saw this:

A video version of this is now the background video of my home page. See it, as no one says, before the snow melts. Because who knows what will replace that video, or when. I’m trying to keep them somewhat topical, and weather is as good an indicator of that as anything else. And right now the weather is changing a bit. Snow one day, almost spring the next, and so on. All of that is better than being in the single digits, so don’t take it as a complaint. But if we hit, and stayed, in the 60s that wouldn’t be so bad, either.

Do you like those videos? I do. They’re a lot of fun and easy to make. There’s some trick to quality I need to resolve, but we’ll get there.

I didn’t spend anytime in the television studio, as I do a few days a week. The show I watch was being produced at the basketball coliseum, where the good guys lost a rivalry game. Here’s the show to tell you all about it:

So, instead, I went to this panel:

Because it seemed like the sort of thing I’d be interested in, right?

Also, when I got there, I saw that they had cookies.

history / Indiana / IU / memories / music / photo / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Ancient wisdom: Indoors shoulders gather no snow
8
Feb 17

Ancient wisdom: Indoors shoulders gather no snow

To break up my 11-hour day I went for a run. And just after we started jogging, The Yankee and I, we went by a window and saw snow flakes. And so being indoors was a good idea. Because I could look like this:

But we ran in this gym instead:

That’s Wildermuth, an intramural facility, where I ran eight miles tonight. From 1928 until 1960 it was the home of the basketball team. And, on this day in 1946, it looked like this:

I’m glad I never had to stand in line to register for a college class. I think my freshman year my alma mater was on their second year of phone registration. At an orientation session they plopped in a VHS tape and made us watch a corny — even by the standards of the day — video about how to sign up for classes. But that system only lasted a few more years. Before I graduated they were doing it all online.

Not in line, online. And that probably changed things, too.

Anyway, a few more views on my snowy walk back from Wildermuth to Franklin Hall, where a sports show was recorded tonight:

You reach a certain point with these sort of pictures where you think “Hey, more snow. Yeah, yeah.” And that is almost always just behind “I can’t feel my hands.”

And as an aside about nothing, we had gumbo for dinner tonight. So I washed the dishes while listening

A Louisiana boy singing Delta and soul blues while snow was on the ground outside.

It makes perfect sense while you’re standing at the kitchen sink.

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