Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
01
May 15

Commercials and fried chicken

Grading, grading and classes. I graded at lunch today, reading over commercials that I’d had students write. Students really seem to dive into the idea of writing commercials. You see some incredible inventiveness and imagination leap off the page. As soon as they figure out how to channel that into non-fiction writing they’ll be on their way. And that’s why I like offering a commercial assignment.

I give them a 30-second spot to fill. You can have an unlimited budget to make your spot happen. The catches are that you have to advertise an existing product and the people that appear in your commercial have to be alive — no Moses or Marilyn Monroe, and they can’t work for the competition.

And in classes today we started the slog toward finals.

I saw this this afternoon.

It was pointing to a tree in the quad, upon which a great deal of random art had been displayed. I had to go to the building in the background to handle a small accounting matter. I met a lady there who summed up two of my Samford themes. Seems she’s counting the days until her second child’s graduation and wedding. She did not look like a woman old enough to be marrying off a second kid, let alone by the grandmother of three. And, yet, there she was. Being around college students keeps you young.

The other thing was the great happiness the lady possessed. I’m sure it was really about the fine weather or that her daughter will soon be married — outdoors, with kilts! — and that the bride and groom will be moving into the same neighborhood.

“I’m getting my baby back,” she said.

It probably had to do with some of those things. Or that it was almost quitting time on Friday. But here was an account who sits in a cube and crunches numbers and had a smile that would have pointed its own way to that tree in the quad.

Samford is pretty special that way. In all of my years here I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t pleased about the opportunity to be a part of it. How many of the jobs you’ve had in your career can offer you that as a perk?

And, now, meatballs and the rest of the NFL Draft.

Have a great weekend. Just remember, the next time you see a commercial, it started because a former student was inspired somewhere along the way. And if they turn Marilyn Monroe into a hologram for the spot, don’t tell my students.

photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
30
Apr 15

They keep us young

They keep us young.

Last night the incoming editor-in-chief of The Samford Crimson poked her head into my office. I was just about ready to call it a night, but students will make you stick around.

Emily is this year’s news editor and she is, as they almost always are at the paper, one squared away individual. She asked me a question about this and we talked about that and then the next thing you know we’d spent an hour discussing journalism and what our newsroom can be. She left at 8 p.m.

Someone asked me a few years ago why it is I want to do this kind of work. And there’s the answer: It is important to the community, but even more so to the students I get to work with. When you have passionate college students doing work they care about, you’re surrounded by a special treat, indeed. Those people deserve as much passion as energy as you can give back. It only makes them better.

And to have the opportunity to work with enthusiastic young men and women so dedicated to learning their craft is simply invigorating.

They asked me that when I interviewed for the job here, too. I went through the importance part and the passion part and the influence my media adviser had when I was in school and then I said “Plus, maybe they’ll keep me young!”

The guy that asked me that just retired last year. He’d watched his second grandchild go through college. Now he goes out and runs four or five miles every day. He agreed with my answer during the interview, I remember it clearly. He knew about students keeping the rest of us young.

The shortest answer, as this year winds down, is that it is a treat, and worth it, and hardly seems like working. And weaved among all of that is a great value.

There’s only one more week with this year’s talented crew. Four of the nucleus I work with are graduating. I’ll break them all down next week after our last, and surely poignant meetings. But first there’s another paper to get through and the departmental picnic and then lost last gatherings.

They keep us young.

I have a small and growing mound of papers to grade. We can blame the silver hair on that.

Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Apr 15

Just another day of skill building

Today’s front page also celebrates the two conference winners:

In the fall we also saw the women’s volleyball team win a conference championship. There are rings all over the place.

Two classes today. In one we discussed television broadcast scripts. In another we discussed commercials. I have students writing a commercial of their own creation. Any existing product, any living people, any music they wanted, any theme or catchphrases they wanted.

So today I heard a bit about the commercials. And they sound really good. You’d want to watch two or three of them attentively, and how often do you say that about commercials?

We had the penultimate critique meeting tonight. Next week the students will produce their last Crimson of the year. I think after that we’ll just have a big party. Or at least some finger foods and bad jokes.

Then, next week, there’s the big picnic, the last paper and the beginning of the year’s goodbyes.

A handful of people will be leaving as seniors, people I’ve known since they were freshmen.

You have fun watching them grow. You enjoy watching them go. You wish it wasn’t so long between sending them off and hearing about their successes.

We do like hearing those success stories.

[Insert half an hour of looking through people’s LinkedIn profiles … ]

I’m going to have to write about some people’s success stories soon.

history / links / Samford / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off
28
Apr 15

The little things

You wonder what things people take from their young adult years, what stories they carry into their hopefully long and prosperous lives. Someone will tell a few of these stories for a good long while, for sure. These celebrations are in the cafeteria:

Nice job @samford_sports, @SamfordTrack, @SamfordWTennis, letting everyone know about SoCon champs. @MartinNewton1 pic.twitter.com/KoVVv6KKmd

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) April 28, 2015

Pretty cool, huh? One of the tennis players has been in two of my classes. One of the track athletes has been in my class and he’ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he’s getting his first ring, as a freshman. All of that is nice, but I just thought it was a nice touch how the folks in the athletic department took steps to point out their team’s success.

Paper tonight, and a run today and a lot of time in the office working on class things. Sometimes it feels as if the grading will never stop.

You might have heard of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. Sad story:

“I’ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I’ve never seen a situation come up so fast,” he said.

And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.

“He’s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,” Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.

Creekmore described Beall as “very passionate about sailing.”

I was downtown tonight, for pizza, and so this was a good night to also see this story, which has probably never happened here before:

As cities around the country look for ways to go green, a recent report shows Birmingham to be leading the way in terms of air quality.

Ozone and fine particulate concentrations in the Birmingham area are at their lowest-ever recorded levels, according to the Jefferson County Department of Public Health.

You don’t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.

The air has been getting progressively better over the years. You can even see the skyline for miles. I remember days as a kid when you couldn’t say that.

This gentleman is believed to be the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders in Alabama:

“My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was — we were surrounded there — can they keep us with enough ammunition?” the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.

“We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,” he said.

Kinney, who had suffered two hits from shrapnel and a bullet across his helmet during the fighting, recalled the Nhpum Ga battle came to a halt on Easter Sunday morning in 1944 with a victory over Japanese soldiers. It was the latest of several hard-fought battles for the Marauders, named after their commander, Gen. Frank D. Merrill, but it wasn’t their last.

“When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,” said Kinney.

Nothing little about that.

I tell students that obituaries aren’t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here’s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, who then lived for a century:

Ione’s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, “She wanted perfection.”

Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, “If you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.”

Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.

She drove a Buick. Whoever writes mine, a long, long time from now, I hope they remember to get in a lot of small details like that. In any kind of stories, I think, those small details are the one that make the imagery sing.

The little details make the big picture.

Glomerata — Comments Off
28
Apr 15

Glomeratas

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. I’m still adding new-to-me editions to my collection and so here we are today. The one I’m showing you here is the 1993 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 1994 Glom.

See all of the covers in my Glom collection here.

Bill Clinton was the president. No one had thought yet of shutting down the government and we were a long way from our national debate on the meaning of the word “is.” NAFTA and Nancy Kerrigan were in the news and people were still saying “information superhighway.” Others were still struggling to pronounce Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Scream was stolen, the Olympics were in Lillehammer and American troops withdrew from Somalia. Kurt Cobain killed himself. Tonya Harding pled guilty and Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Richard Nixon died.

Students in the fall before, if they followed the news, learned more about Sydney and Mogadishu and worried about an uprising in Moscow and nuclear tests in China. Early that fall I decided, for sure, that I wanted to go to Auburn. I’d had ideas previously, but that fall I made some visits and fell for the place.

There were 263 million people in the U.S. in 1994. Some 4.26 million of them were in Alabama, more than double the pre-World War II census. Guy Hunt, the first Republican governor Alabama had known since Reconstruction, had just left office as Alabama’s first governor removed from office for a criminal conviction. He paid his fines and served his probation and got a pardon. Considered by some to be an accidental governor, he was considered a bumpkin by opponents but took advantage of a splintered Democratic party. Trivia: A minister, farmer and salesman, Hunt was the last governor of Alabama that didn’t attend college. He fought in Korea instead. He’s also a man who made Alabama a two-party state. And now, of course, state politics have tipped entirely the other direction. Guy Hunt died in 2009. When he stepped down, he was succeeded in 1993 by his lieutenant governor, Jim Folsom, Jr. He ran in 1994, but was beaten by the former-Democrat-turned-Republican (and Auburn grad) Fob James. James was returning to an office he’d held 20 years earlier. Folsom would show up, a decade later, again as lieutenant governor. (Alabama is a cyclical place.)

Alabama, and much of the southeast, was hit hard by an ice storm in 1994. Heather Whitestone, who would later become Miss America, was enjoying her time as Miss Alabama. Birmingham, the state’s largest city, was in the middle of a nine-year stretch of triple-digit homicides. Local boy and NASCAR hero Davey Allison died in a helicopter accident. I was busy navigating high school. As if that was all.