Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Get It First, But Get It Right



George McGovern's death this week brought to mind an unlikely incident from election night in 1972, one that would tell me that I might be getting through to at least some students. At the same time, it would offer me a teaching opportunity that I missed that night but made good use of in the future.

I was an assistant professor in the Marquette University College of Journalism in those days, and I moonlighted as a reporter and news announcer for WISN. Too junior to teach summer school courses, I had jumped at the chance to be a summer replacement at the station when the news director, Don Froehlich, offered me the opportunity a year or so earlier. That turned into weekend work, as well, and stints covering special events like election nights
.
On election night in 1972, Don gave me the keys to the news department car and sent me downtown to report on the doings at the election night headquarters of the Democrats and their presidential candidate, George McGovern. McGovern had long trailed in the polls and was given no chance of winning, but how low he had sunk I did not know until then. Headquarters was in the Wisconsin Hotel, on Third Street, just north of Wisconsin Avenue.

Major candidates for statewide office and for the presidency, or their representatives, normally had suites in upscale hotels like the Schroeder Hotel, on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Fifth Street and the elegant old Pfister, on the East Side at Wisconsin and Jefferson Street.  Their supporters ate and drank and danced to live orchestras in the ballrooms. It was my observation (“Lorenz’s Law, I was bold enough to call it) that those candidates destined to win took up election night residence in the Pfister, and that held through the years that I was reporting.

I had never known a candidate’s headquarters to be at the Wisconsin. The hotel seemed to me to be about half a star above those establishments that rented rooms by the hour. Sailors going through boot camp at the Naval Station Great Lakes stayed there when on liberty in Milwaukee. But that’s where the McGovern operatives had settled. 

When I walked in, I spotted a telephone sign over an alcove off the lobby and I went over to it. On a bench seat in the alcove were two of my students, also reporting for radio stations that night. I greeted them and looked over at the pay telephones. Both had “Out of Order” signs on them.

I asked the boys if they knew where another telephone was. 

 “You can use one of these," one said softly. "We put those signs on them to make sure we had a phone when we needed one.”

The two of them had taken my history of journalism course the year before, and they had heard me lecture on the importance that reporters, over the years, had placed on establishing communications.

 I usually told the story of the excellent 19th century reporter Henry Grady, who was in Tallahassee to report on the award of the state’s disputed electoral votes in 1876. Before the decision was released, Grady checked on telegraph service and found that the  lines out of the city had been cut. He hired a buckboard and driver and they drove until he found a telegraph office with communication to the outside world. They returned to Tallahassee. When the decision was handed down—Hayes would get the votes—Grady jumped into the buckboard, and  while the driver lashed his horses to get full speed out of them, Grady sat alongside writing his story. When they reached the telegraph office, his story was not quite ready, so he gave the telegrapher a speller to send, thereby establishing his claim on the line until he finished the story. (There was a side lesson there, of course, on the reporter’s concern that he spell correctly

Later in the course, I told my students stories about Merriman Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning White House correspondent for United Press and its successor, United Press International. In April, 1945, he was at President Franklin Roosevelt’s Little White House at Warm Springs, Ga., when reporters were called to the President’s cabin. Smith spotted a telephone next to a chair when he entered the living room, and sensing something important was up—an end to the war in Europe or, possibly, an announcement about the president’s health—he hid the telephone behind the chair. When the press secretary announced FDR’s death, the other reporters ran out to find telephones. Smith waited until they were gone, retrieved the hidden phone and then called in his bulletin.

I also recounted the story of Smith’s work on the day President Kennedy was assassinated. He was riding the front seat of the wire service car in the presidential motorcade in Dallas and just happened to be talking on the car’s radiotelephone to someone in UPI’s Dallas bureau when he heard shots fired. He dictated the first bulletin, that three shots had been fired at the motorcade, and gave what other details he could as the cars sped to Parkland hospital. Jack Bell, the Associated Press correspondent, was sitting in the back seat, and began to beat on Smith and demand his turn with the phone. He raised welts on Smith's back, but the UPI man would not let go.  When the press car wheeled into the hospital’s emergency room entrance, Smith tossed the phone at Bell, jumped out of the car and sprinted past the president’s limousine. He saw Mrs. Kennedy’s roses lying in the president’s blood in the back seat and asked Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who was standing near the car, the president’s condition. “He’s dead,” Hill said. Smith sprinted into the hospital, found a telephone at a nurse’s station and began dictating those details. Smith scored a clear beat for UPI that day, partly out of luck, I said, but also because he knew that it wasn't enough to get the story, it was crucial to get it out and on the wire.  
 
The students sitting by those telephones had taken to heart the lesson of those stories, and I was proud of them. Years later, however, I also regularly taught a mass communication ethics course, and I used them as an example of going over the line in controlling communications. Grady using a speller to “own” the telegraph line was one thing;  their putting a bogus “Out of Order" sign on a telephone was another. And my comment to those ethics students was that while I would have given those two fellows an A for mastering the history lesson, had I had them in ethics, I would have had to give them an F. 

Did I use one of those pay phones, you might ask. You bet.




















Monday, October 15, 2012

The Kansas City Milkman




Marc Murdock, a longtime teacher at Kansas City’s Jesuit high school, Rockhurst, died recently.

I never had Marc Murdock for a class. How I missed chemistry or, especially, algebra with him I do not know. His obit states that he “scared the quadratic equation into hundreds, even thousands, of young men.”  But given my abilities in math, I doubt that even he could have scared the material into me, and my academic life might well have ended in his classroom.

But because I was on the staffs of Rockhurst’s monthly news magazine, Prep News, and the yearbook, The Chancellor, however, I did have frequent association with him. He took most of the photographs for both publications, and he was moderator of the yearbook. He was a very nice fellow, and I liked him and got along well with him.


At least until one morning during Christmas vacation of my senior year. Yearbook staff members were supposed to be at school that day to work on the book. But as dedicated to journalism as I was, I was crazy in love with the enchanting Helen Mary D'Arcy, and vacation time was better spent with her, at her house, my teen-age reasoning went, than with a bunch of other guys in that dank basement room at Rockhurst that was allotted to the yearbook (I still think so).

At some point there was a knock on the back door.

"Milkman."


 
Helen Mary’s mother asked if I would get the door.

When I opened it, I came face to face with the milkman from Country Club Dairy: Marc Murdock.  A 25-year-old high school teacher with a family that would grow to 12 children, he delivered milk during vacation periods, and the families of a good number of his students were on his varied routes. On that day, he was delivering in the Indian Hills area of suburban Johnson County.

Mr. Murdock was not happy to see me, nor I him.

"Aren't you supposed to be at the school?" he asked. I said I was, or maybe I just nodded sheepishly. He handed me the milk and whatever else he was delivering and left.

Mr. Murdock never said word after that about my being A.W.O.L., and I continued to work on the yearbook up to the time we sent it to the printer. My picture appeared in the staff photos in the book.  

At the honors assembly in the spring, however, when staff members were called to the front, one by one, and awarded golden lapel pins for their work, my name was not called.

So while I never had Mr. Murdock as a teacher, he taught me a good lesson—one  that Woody Allen put in  words years later, and one that I passed on to my students occasionally: "Eighty percent of success is showing up."

A footnote. Ten years later, when I was working for United Press International, I picked up a novel about journalists with a foreign bureau of a fictional news agency. It was The Kansas City Milkman, written by a former United Press foreign correspondent. It took its title from an admonition to a rookie correspondent from the fictional bureau chief, though it was supposedly once spoken by a real-life UP editor: "And remember, you are writing so it can be understood by the Kansas City Milkman. If the Kansas City Milkman can't understand it, the dispatch is badly written."  I still have that book, and I've occasionally thought of  my vacation-day encounter with Mr. Murdock, that vacation-time Kansas City milkman, when I have glanced over and seen  it on the shelf.

And a footnote to that. If you have seen the movie Broadcast News, you will remember that there is a flashback in which William Hurt's anchorman character is shown as a boy with his father—a  Kansas City milkman.

R.I.P. Mr. Murdock.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

A Week Away From Isaac

Here in New Orleans today, things are “literally back to normal,” as the mayor told us citizens at one of his gang bang news conferences the other day.

One week after our battering and soaking by Hurricane Isaac, we had sunshine outside and, inside, electric power. Fewer than 17,000 of Entergy's nearly 200,000 home and business customers were still without power earlier in the day, but we were told that Entergy crews were on the streets and up in their gondolas repairing lines downed by falling trees or tree limbs or simply high winds. The executive suite crew were summoned to appear before the City Council to explain why the repairs have taken so long. 

In our neighborhood, a venerable pecan tree was uprooted by the wind, and much of it toppled into a neighbor’s yard. The ground had been saturated in this summer of heavy rains, and in other areas I passed in my travels after the storm other perfectly healthy trees had been uprooted from the soggy soil by Isaac's Category 1 winds. Around the corner, the upper trunk of an oak tree was diseased in the center (it became obvious), and in the wind, the healthy portion could not hold, broke off and took a power line into the street with it

We lost power at our house at about 10 p.m. last Tuesday; it was restored at about 10 Saturday night. Fortunately, a next-door neighbor with a large generator invited us to plug an extension cord into one of its outlets, and I alternated hooking up our refrigerator and a small freezer we have in the shed in back. That saved most of the food. For light, we had a couple of candles and three small LED flashlights.
The missus bought a battery-powered lantern at Loew’s, but she neglected to buy the eight D batteries that would power it. Surely, she thought, we had D batteries at the house. Yeah, two or three. But they, I found, were two or three more than any store in our area that I visited had in stock. By happy accident, returning home empty –handed after an hour or more of battery hunting, I spotted a hand-lettered sign at an intersection along the streetcar tracks telling me that my favorite small hardware store, just down Oak Street, had D batteries. How was that possible when Radio Shack, Home Depot, Loew’s, Walgreen’s and other big stores had none? I made a hard left across the tracks (the streetcars are safe in the car barn these days) and pulled up in front of the store. I bought an Energizer 8-pack, and took it home,in triumph. If only I had had an ear of the bunny to nail to the wall.

Our cell phones ran low, and I had not thought ahead to getting a battery-operated power source for them. My daughter‘s house in the suburb of Jefferson, about five miles upriver, never lost power , while all around them, other houses were black. To get the phones juiced, I drove there through mostly empty streets , plugged in the phones, had a beer with my son-in-law, talked about the storm with him and watched my grandsons play video games.

With power out, news was hard to come by. We missed two days of the Times-Picayune. On Thursday, a plastic bag thrown on the lawn held the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday editions. The Wednesday edition had been printed in Mobile and was on that narrow, shorter newsprint that a number of papers have gone to, including The World’s Greatest Newspaper. The staff had done a fine job of pulling the story together, and their stories made of interesting reading even two days late. But readers were reminded that we could have read the news online on Nola.com: “I would have liked to,” my unsent diatribe to the new publisher began, "but I had no electricity and my Internet service provider was down.”

The NY Times covered the reporters covering the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/hurricane-isaac-coverage-online-hints-at-times-picayunes-future.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

If great online journalism is done and no one can get online to read it, is it still journalism?

At my house, we turned on a multi-frequency portable radio I bought for some weather emergency years ago. The staccato voice on the weather frequency repeated the latest forecasts and warnings over and over. WWL-AM (the big 870) spilled onto most all the frequencies. Callers mostly complained about the slow response of emergency powerline repair crews. The talk show hosts pontificated, whether informed or not, and called out “next caller.”

The best call of the week, I judged, was from a fellow who said he did not go into Bourbon St. strip joints for the usual reasons—whatever those are; he did not say. But he liked to stop in one fairly often just to relax. And in that one, he said, he saw lots of linemen drinking beer and ogling the dancers.

The talk frequently gave way to the gang bang news conferences the mayor, area parish presidents and the governor like to perform to demonstrate that they are on top of the situation. They faced the cameras surrounded by department heads who stepped to the mike on cue to tell us they had everything under control. Hunker down, they told us, and take comfort in knowing that the National Guard has boots on the ground and Entergy is on the way.

The only tv signal was carried on the fm frequency of the local NPR affiliate. I had no problem listening to stories from reporters and anchors. But making sense of the weather was a chore, specially when I kept hearing that we were not out of the woods yet. Put on a blindfold some evening and try understanding a station’s weathercaster describe what you are not seeing on his map.

My favorite weatherman won’t have much to complain about tonight—only the heat, I suppose.

I certainly can’t complain about our situation. Like almost all others protected by the levee system we suffered only minor damage to the house. But hurricanes always leave behind people who have to rebuild their homes and, many, their lives. We are being shown their plight now in the wake of the storm. Give a thought to them occasionally, and, if you are so inclined, say a prayer for them.



Thursday, July 26, 2012

A Tale of Two Motorcades

President Obama and I waved to each other on a recent afternoon.

We weren’t exactly on equal terms. He was looking through the tinted protective-glass window of his limousine as it sped by at some 40 to 50 miles an hour along Claiborne Avenue, a main thoroughfare into downtownNew Orleans  that intersects our street, Burdette. I was standing on the curb squinting at the shadow waving at me from behind the window.

I had an inkling he might be on the way when I looked out my front window about 4 o’clock and saw the neighbors in the corner house on their front stoop, other neighbors scattered along the curb and a policeman who had parked his car against a barricade the end of our street. I had put three and one together: the crowd, an Air Force helicopter that had been circling for half an hour or more, and a report earlier that for a day or so police barriers had been stacked up at nearby intersection, plus a story in the morning blat that Obama was to open the annual meeting of the Urban League that evening with a speech, led me to the conclusion that the president could be passing at any moment. I went outside.

A squad of police motorcycles went by. The next door neighbor said an earlier group had sounded like a roll of thunder when it passed. Then came more cycles, some black limos, and then the president’s. I walked to the curb and waved, he waved, and the limo disappeared around the bend to the right, heading just six blocks away, to a home on Audubon Boulevard where some people who would be excluded from his planned tax cut were gathered to hear him ask for for campaign donations (Did he use that age-old plea for Mardi Gras favors, “Throw me somethin’, mister”?).

When the motorcade was going through—and before, I’m sure, none but official cars and motorcycles were allowed on the three lanes of Claiborne going southeast, into downtown. Outward bound traffic in the lanes on the other side of the median, was at a standstill. Within 15 or 20 minutes after the motorcade had passed, the drivers going home were able to pick up speed. But no cars were in the near lanes.

On Burdette, drivers trying to get across the median or turn right were backed up behind the barrier and a few drivers got out only to be told by the policeman that they could not get past. Why the police had not put a barrier at the other end of the street, at Neron Place, I do not know. If they had, drivers would have been able to get to an outlet open to them. But the police and the men who dig up the streets to repair sewer pipes and gas lines never seem to think that far ahead.

A half hour or more after the motorcade had passed, the officer moved the barrier to the median strip and began motioning cars through. It had been almost an hour since I waved Godspeed to the president. Perhaps Mr. Obama would have made his pitch and left for a less exclusive fundraiser at the House of Blues, in the French Quarter.

Almost immediately after the barrier disappeared,, some few drivers made it across Claiborne or turned right. But a flood of cars that must have been dammed somewhere back along Claiborne, perhaps behind Carrollton Avenue, a major street three blocks away, were let loose and soon clogged all three lanes. And in keeping with one of the customs of this city that prides itself on Southern hospitality, when they stopped, they blocked the crossing so that no cars could get out of Burdette.

In hardly any time, traffic was moving normally. Rush hour was over, and only a few cars were speeding in each direction.

The thought occurred that the president, on his return to the airport after his speech to the Urban League, would travel on the Interstate when few cars would be heading west.

Behind him, those Urban League members (who, the next morning’s newspaper reported, received him ecstatically) would have a happy memory to tell and retell for the rest of their days. Some rush hour drivers on Claiborne would have resentments that they might take out at the polls, though Louisiana will go Republican anyway. Others of those drivers would simply forget the inconvenience.

Me? I have his wave captured in my mind’s eye.

-0-

An historical footnote:

The episode reminded me of the last time I saw a president in a motorcade.

It was June 23, 1969.

I was in Washington that day. I had served two weeks of Army Reserve duty at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, in early June, and afterwards I spent a week or so in the capital doing research at the Library of Congress.

On the 23rd, Warren Burger was to be sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States, succeeding Earl Warren, The Washington Post had reported that morning, so I walked the few blocks along First Street N.E. from the Library to the Supreme Court to gawk at the invited guests as they arrived. It was a gorgeous June day, warm and sunny.

A number of individuals went up the long flight of marble stairs to the building, but none I recognized. Then a black limousine pulled up, a liveried driver got out and opened the rear door on the passenger’s side, unfurled a large black umbrella and held it over the door as a chunky man exited. It was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The chauffeur held the umbrella over him and the two walked slowly up the steps.

Sometime during my wait, while the ceremony was going on inside, I had heard that President Nixon was there, but that his limo had entered the building’s garage on the Second Street N.E. side. I walked around back and stood on the sidewalk near the garage exit to try to catch a glimpse of him.

I was rewarded by seeing the president’s car come out of the garage and make a right turn in front of me. It moved only slightly while the motorcade came together, so for a few moments I found myself face to face with Richard Nixon. He smiled and held up a hand in a regal gesture.

I looked like the sort of young man the president would like. I was 32, clean-shaven, my military haircut still close-cropped, and I was neatly dressed—I might even have had a jacket and tie on for my work at the Library of Congress. I was not at all like those unwashed, bearded, and long-haired Vietnam-war protestors in filthy clothes that Nixon despised.

He appeared startled, then, when I stared back at him, unsmiling, and held up my hand, forefinger and middle finger in a “V,” and pushed the gesture toward his face. His smile disappeared, but he kept looking at me, as in disbelief, and then the motorcade started and he was gone.

A Secret Service agent had been standing just to my left and, I’m sure, had had his eye on me. When the motorcade started, he did a right face in front of me and stepped hard on my foot.

My left foot.





Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Harry Truman levels with me



The Harry S Truman Library Institute sent me a mailing about a month ago announcing  the Institute’s plans to celebrate  President Truman’s birthday, May 8. That took me back 47 years, to the spring of 1965, when I was conducting research for my M.A. thesis on President Truman's press conferences.*

The  Institute gave me a grant that just about covered gas for the trip from Carbondale, Illinois, to Independence, Missouri, and lunches for a week or ten days of research at the Truman Library in Independence (I bunked with my parents, who lived in a Kansas suburb on the other side of Kansas City). 

Near the end of my stay, I asked to meet Mr. Truman, and on my last day there I was given a brief audience, though I was cautioned that I could use nothing from our talk in my thesis. At precisely the time of my appointment, Mr. Truman appeared in the doorway between his office and the sitting room next to it looking just like, well, Harry Truman, in double-breasted suit and thick glasses, and he greeted me with a big give-me-your-vote smile and strong handshake.

Mr. Truman motioned for me to take a seat on the couch and sat down next to me. We chatted a bit about his views of the press conference, though I can’t recall that anything I might have used came out of the conversation. In my reading of the press conference transcripts, I had come across instances in which Mr. Truman misspoke in answering a question and after  reporters had played those up in their stories, he sometimes had sharp words for them. Reporters also sometimes tried to push him to respond in a way that he didn’t want to respond or read more into his responses than he intended or flat out misconstrued what he had said. In those instances, the president chastised the reporters. He occasionally took their bosses to task for what he saw as the publishers' biases against him and his administration. 

 I had hoped to get his reaction to all that, to take something substantive away from the interview, but I was disappointed. When I sensed that my time was nearly up, however, I asked, "Mr. Truman, do you think the press abused you when you were president?" He leaned over, looked me in the eye, and in his clipped “Mizzurah” twang he said, "No. They can't abuse the President of the United States." Then he punched my left leg just above the knee with his right forefinger a time or two, his eyes narrowed, and he said, "But there were a helluva lot of 'em who would have if they could have."

Off the record though the interview was, I confess that I could not resist using that statement in my thesis. But I softened (or hid, if you like) the lapse by including it not in the text, but in a footnote, and when I sent a copy to the library, as required by the grant agreement, the only criticism that Philip C. Brooks, the director of the library, had was that I had misspelled the name of one of Mr. Truman's advisers, Harry Vaughan, as "Vaughn." 

None of my professor thesis committee members caught the misspelling. But, as professors do, they did read the footnotes, and they enjoyed the comment as much as I did – and as I still do.

 ----------
*During Truman’s presidency, most reporters at the press conferences were “press.” Almost without exception they were correspondents for newspapers or the wire services that provided news to newspapers, though some radio reporters were part of  the White House press corps. It has only been in more recent years, with the explosion of reporters for television that the abominable term “media conference" has come about. If I had my way, the term would be "news conference" to put the emphasis on the news and not the news gatherers.
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I mined my thesis for two articles for academic journals:
“Truman and the Press Conference,” Journalism Quarterly, 43:4 (Winter, 1966), 671-79; 708. 
“Truman and the Broadcaster,” Journal of Broadcasting, 13:1 (Winter, 1968-69), 17-22.


Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The things our students remember


The great reward of a career in university teaching (Lord knows, it isn’t the pension) is getting a hint, now and then, that in ways large and small one has had some influence on some students.  That occurred to me recently in exchanges with two former students whom I taught on two campuses and nearly four decades apart.

One came from a fellow who, as a sophomore at Marquette some 40 years ago, had taken my beginning newswriting class. Kevin was given one of the university’s major alumni awards this spring for his superb work as a p.r. man over his career for Marquette and for two NFL teams, and I wrote to congratulate him. In his reply, he reminded me of an episode at the beginning of the course. I had given the students their first in-class writing assignment, a story based on notes I handed out. My purpose was to get an idea of the level of writing skill each student was bringing to the class.

“I began writing my story with a pen,” he wrote, “until you stepped up to me and asked: ‘What are you doing?’ When I explained that I couldn’t type, you replied, ‘You’re going to have to start learning right now.’” He added, “Lesson started and learned.” And he said he had often told that story over the years.
I had not remembered that, and what I thought he might have recalled was my reaction to an assignment later in the semester.. After I had gone over in class the elements and structure of the speech story, I gave the students a copy of a speech and told them to write a story about it as homework. 

At the beginning of the next class, as I picked up the stories, his caught my eye. He had handed me simply a copy of the speech--neatly typed and letter perfect, by the way. 

Why had he turned in a copy of the copy I had given him, I asked. Kevin said that he thought that was the best way to faithfully convey what the speaker had said. That was hard to argue with, but I managed to convince him that a well-written story could get a speaker’s major points and the flavor of the speech across to readers and in an economical way that was best-suited to the limited space of a newspaper. He learned that lesson, too, and he turned out to be an excellent writer.
Within a week or so came an email from another Kevin, a Loyola graduate of more recent years who, as a freshman, had been a student in my introductory writing course. I always thumped Will Strunk and E.B. White’s slim The Elements of Style like a preacher at a revival in that course and used some of White’s essays as examples of excellent writing—among them, the poignant “Once More to the Lake,” which I could never discuss with a class lest they see their professor in tears. 

Kevin  told me that he had moved to New York City earlier in the year and one of the first things he had done was to buy a copy of White's "Here Is New York.”  He said he wanted to tell me that and to say that he “found it very instructive and surprisingly accurate even 60 years after it was written.”  I was delighted to hear from him and to know that a bit of my adulation of White as a writer had rubbed off on him.

I have to confess, though, that that wasn’t all he remembered of me. Kevin had been in the class in the spring of 2005, and in the fall, during our “Katrina semester,” studied  at Loyola University of Chicago.*  My family and I had taken refuge from the storm and its aftermath  in Chicago, too, and I had made use of the free semester to do  research at the Newberry Library.  Kevin and I met near there late one gorgeous autumn morning for a long, chatty lunch. Afterwards, he reminded me in his note, “We were walking back towards the L station when I heard the train go by beneath our feet. I said to you, ‘I think I just missed my train,’ to which you responded, ‘Don't worry, Kevin. Trains are like women. You wait 15 minutes and there's another one.’”

“I wanted to let you know I think of this advice often,” he wrote, “and it has brought me great comfort over the years.”   

My “advice” of course was a twist of the old gag line, “women are like trains,…” but I did not mention that.  
------------------------------
*Kevin’s story of his arrival in New Orleans the weekend before Katrina and his almost immediate departure for what he and the rest of us at the university thought would be “a brief holiday” was the lead of an article I wrote that fall for the magazine  Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education on the effects of Katrina on Loyola and Spring Hill College in Mobile and the response of the country’s other Jesuit institutions.


Sunday, May 20, 2012

Hobnobbing with the First Lady


Elena Volpert Mappus, a former student who is now a public relations executive with Southern Company in Atlanta, recently posted on her Facebook page, a photo of herself and a small group of other folks who had been interviewing former president Jimmy Carter about  energy matters for a documentary about the company.

As sometimes happens, the photo triggered a flashback for me, a memory of the night of April 6, 1976, the night of the Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin. I was teaching journalism at Marquette University then and moonlighting as a reporter for  WISN radio in the summers, on weekends and on election nights. I was out with my tape recorder that night. 

The contestants were Morris Udall, U.S. representative from Arizona and Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer and former governor of the state, who was traveling the country with his suit bag slung over his shoulder in an improbable quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had had successes in earlier state primaries, but the polls were showing him behind Udall, and the  returns that night consistently showed Udall leading.

I joined a horde of other journalists in a corridor leading to Udall’s suite at the Hotel Schroeder, on Sixth St., Udall did not come out to talk to us, but I vividly recall his wife pushing through the crowd to get into their suite. She talked, but only to say, “Let me through, please.”

My thought was “Let me out,” and I left the Udall watch and drove across town on Wisconsin Ave.  to the grand old Pfister Hotel on the east side of the Milwaukee. There, supporters and news people were gathered in a ballroom, and the supporters were glum. 

Someone at a desk near the door handed me a peel-off label my with “Carter Campaign News Media Wisconsin Election Night” typed on it. That’s up on a wall as I write, alongside the press card issued to me by the Chicago Police Dept. when I went to work on United Press International's national broadcast news desk 14 years earlier.

I stuck the label on my lapel, and almost immediately in the midst of that crowd, I came on an old friend and former boss from my UPI days, John Pelletreau, the broadcast news editor, chatting with UPI political reporter Arnold Sawislak. We talked for awhile, and at some point, I asked if either knew what floor Carter’s suite was on. Arnie told me the floor—whatever it was—and I went for an elevator ride.
The first person I saw when the doors opened was Roslyn Carter. She was in a housecoat studying a sheet of paper with returns on it. I introduced myself. Behind her was a giant of a Secret Service man who looked at me menacingly. “Shall I take care of this guy?” he asked her. “No,” Mrs. Carter said. “He’s o.k.” The Secret Service man backed away, but stayed close enough to deal with me in a hurry if it turned out I wasn’t o.k.

I switched on my tape recorder. “What do these numbers mean?”  “It looks to me like Jimmy’s pulling ahead.  she said. She had columns of figures on that sheet and was adding them up and down and across, and it appeared to me that what they were telling her was right.—her husband  had gained on Udall and had a slight lead.

I asked her a few questions, and she was generous in talking to me, but I didn’t keep her long. It was obvious she wanted to go get the latest numbers. I went back downstairs, got a drink from the bar, and found Pelletreau and Sawislak again to brag about my exclusive. 

I don’t know what it time it was that the returns gave Carter his victory, but he finally showed up in the ballroom to the cheers of his supporters. There’s nothing so boisterous as the cheering of a crowd whose team—or candidate—is  losing only to emerge with a victory. That one was raucus.

The volume rose even more when Carter held up a copy of the first edition of the next morning’s Milwaukee Sentinel with the banner headline “CARTER UPSET BY UDALL.”  The picture, of course, was reminiscent of the famous one of President Harry S Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune after his upset victory over Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election.
 
While the crowd roared, I left the ballroom and drove back to the radio station to edit my tape and write stories for the late night and early morning newscasts. 

The victory helped Jimmy Carter secure the Democratic presidential nomination and, in the general election, beat the incumbent, Gerald Ford to become President of the United States.

As for me, I had four years when I could slip into conversations the line, “Well, when I interviewed Roslyn Carter….”

Sunday, May 13, 2012

A letter from an acquantance who is in the know


An acquaintance who has been flirting with the birther movement writes:

“After Obama’s declaration of support for so-called ‘gay marriage,’ all the evidence has clearly fallen into place, and I am now absolutely convinced that Obama was born in Kenya. Not only that, we in the movement are certain that the man known as Barack Obama was born a female named ‘Barbara.’

“This is what happened, and in the movement we know this for a fact. Her Kenyan father and American mother brought the infant Barbara Obama to the United States from Kenya right after she was born, and they settled in Hawaii The father was disappointed at having a female child and was determined to have a son. Barbara’s mother, however, was incapable of having any more children, so the father decided to have his daughter’s sex changed. As a Kenyan, his decisions were law in that household. All this has been documented by Barbara’s grandmother, the mother of Barbara’s father, whose diary, with the Kenyan birth certificate tucked between the pages, was recently found in a hut in the village in which she had lived. All this is widely known among the birthers. I am told on the best authority, also that the documentation is in the hands of John Boehner and Eric Cantor, who plan to release it at just the right moment.

“But to continue this curious story, once in Hawaii, the parents contracted with a renowned sex change surgeon who practiced in Hawaii  to perform the operation. On the day of the surgery, they took to the child to him, and the surgeon began his work. My source--a well-known figure in the birther movement--tells me that the surgeon reworked the infant’s private parts into a penis and a scrotum. Unfortunately, however, the parents of the male infant whose tiny testicles were to be transplanted into the new scrotum of Barbara/Barack reneged on their agreement to provide their child’s testicles. As a result, the surgeon simply sewed up the empty scrotum. (To of us in the movement, of course, that explains Obama’s lack of cojones).

“Nevertheless, at the father’s insistence and, I’m told, for an additional fee, the surgeon completed a Hawaii birth certificate for ‘Barack’ Obama, a male child, and recorded that he was born in Hawaii. All of that is well known among those in the know, Unfortunately, the surgeon mysteriously disappeared almost immediately after Obama’s bogus inauguration. Coincidence? I think not.

“What has that to do with Obama’s support for marriage between homosexuals? Everything. Without testicles, you see, Obama is still technically a woman, and she is ‘married’ to Michelle, another woman. That is clearly a homosexual relationship that he would like to have recognized by another ‘marriage’ to her.

 “It is all so clear now, isn't it.”

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

A father and daughter look at graduation


A note with instructions for faculty participants in Loyola’s graduation was in my in-box the other day, and that got me musing on the 2004 graduation, when our daughter Mary, our youngest child, graduated from Loyola.

Mary, was a columnist for the university’s weekly newspaper, The Maroon, in her senior year, and a few days before her final column appeared, the adviser told me she thought it was delightful. I stopped in at The Maroon layout room and read it on the flats, and I was moved to write a reply for the same issue. I think I got mine in just ahead of the paper’s deadline, and the op ed page editor accepted it.

My musing led me to Google the column and my response, and I thought my two or three readers might be entertained by the exchange in this graduation month.

Here was Mary’s column. My response follows.

Goodbye, Loyola. I am off to Paris to begin a glamorous new life ... eventually, anyway. Between that time and graduation, however, I will be back under my parents' roof, which I am totally and utterly okay with. Not having to pay rent will not suck.

Plus, it's cool to have a curfew at the age of 22, right?

Some people might wonder if it bothers me that I don't have a job yet. Does the fact that I don't even have any leads make me wonder if I've wasted four years of my life in the wrong major? They might ask whether I worry that the world will never see that I could be so much more than just the college newspaper columnist with a bad picture and a lame catchphrase.

I really haven't thought about these things, to be honest. Sure I may have had a few sleepless nights where I've considered that a career in gaming and bartending might be a safer, more lucrative path, but who hasn't?

Only recently did I find a little extra time during which to pause and seriously think about my future plans.

Last week my roommate and I waited five hours at the hospital until the doctor finally saw her and diagnosed her acute nausea as food poisoning.

Never mind that I could have diagnosed this condition at home in less than a minute, although my medical expertise is limited to knowing what aisle at Walgreens contains the acetaminophen. And never mind that the term "Emergency Room" is severely misleading and indicates that people who go in there to be treated will be attended to immediately. (As if, I don't know, there was some sort of emergency.)
All the waiting is really a good thing, because it gives the sick a chance to fully realize the depths of their pain and the amazing and loyal people who wait for them a chance to catch up on three weeks' worth of crossword puzzles.

Even though sitting in a hospital waiting room is surprisingly low on the list of things I enjoy doing into the wee hours of the morning, I didn't let that time go to waste.
Again, I had a chance to work on some crossword puzzles, catch up on season four of the "X-Files" and do a lot of thinking. A lot of thinking. A lot. And really, when and where else was I going to make time to taste and experience all the fine cuisine that hospital vending machines have to offer? When? I even got to read the front page of the previous day's The Times-Picayune twice. (Twice!)

Around hour three, however, the incredible fun came to an abrupt halt. I had been staring into space for about 45 minutes when it suddenly occurred to me that this was about to be my life for the next few months: one long and uncertain stay in the hospital waiting room that is my parents' house, with limited resources to keep me busy.

As much as I enjoy marathon games of tic-tac-toe - and I do - I suspect it isn't the most productive use of my time, nor might it be the most efficient means to finding a job.

It's strange to think that I won't have school to go back to in the fall. It's not that I'm afraid to leave the safe confines of a college campus.

After all, no amount of studying will give me the friends for whom enduring four hours in a claustrophobic room are worth and who I am confident would do the same for me. Nor will it ever prepare any of us for the bad sushi that will sometimes come our way. The uncertainty of not knowing what is next is what truly terrifies me.

I pondered this thought for another hour.

Finally, at 2:30 in the morning, my roommate and I, exhausted and malnourished, went home - she with a prescription for what I suspect is nothing more than Mylanta, and I with the resolve to just stop freaking out. I don't begrudge those who already have jobs or any sort of post-college plans (for the most part).
I take comfort in knowing that I'm not alone in my doubts, that there's always Moler Beauty College (although I'm calling that "Plan B"), and that I have at least another few years before my parents kick me out (and that's where Parisian sugar daddy comes in). Au revoir, mes amis.

-0-
Dear Mary,
I read in your column in the Life and Times section, a few pages on, that you will be graduating in a couple of weeks and moving back home to think about how you intend to gain fame and fortune when you finally head off to Paris.

That's a lot for a father to digest at one sitting.

Like others who have been responsible for the care and feeding of this year's graduating class for the last 20 years or more, your mother and I are experiencing a tangle of emotions - especially because you are the youngest of our five.

As we've anticipated watching you stride across that stage in cap and gown, we have relived the morning you walked into a kindergarten classroom clutching our hands.

And it hasn't taken much of a stretch of the mind's eye to see you standing in your crib for the first time, wobbly but proud, your diaper draping the latitude of the hip-huggers you wear today.

You were still not much more than a child, or so it seemed, the day we moved you into the dorm for your freshman year, then, just as we wake one spring morning startled to find the azaleas have burst into full flower, one day you came in the door and you were a young woman.

When we paused to wonder at how that happened we realized how much you have changed over these last four years.

You have learned a great deal, in classrooms, in the library and even at places like Madigan's.

You've matured emotionally and intellectually in ways you perhaps don't recognize.

You've developed into one terrific writer. And as we consider all that you have become, we are proud of you beyond measure, as we are of your four siblings.

Sure, I know you have had a few sleepless nights lately weighing a career in bartending or crossword-puzzle solving against going for a graduate degree at Moler Barber College.

And when, with diploma cover in hand, you maneuver those narrow stairs leading down from the stage next Saturday you may see only desert stretching out ahead of you.

It may be cold comfort, but the person in front is likely stepping into that same void, and so is the person in back of you.

I remember breaking under a dinner table interrogation in my senior year and confessing that I didn't know what I was going to do. My mother burst into tears and said, "If only you had taken some education courses, you could at least teach."

Somehow I made it through, and so did my classmates - in part by luck, in part by purpose, even with a few side trips along the way. (And, as it turned out, Mom, I could at least teach.) You and your classmates have the wherewithal to do the same.

Now there's that matter of your living at home for a while. You wrote that you will have "another few years before my parents kick me out," but that was a typo, wasn't it? You meant "months," didn't you? "Weeks?"

Whichever, you may be "totally and utterly okay" with it. But remember, as Ecclesiastes might have written, there's a time to nest and a time to fly.

We do want to make you feel at home, though, for the short time you are with us.

You will find fresh linens on your bed. And we'll lay in a stock of the coffee you've become addicted to in your college years and extra munchies to get you through reruns of "Friends."

At least for the first week.

We'll even deliver the want ads section of The Times-Picayune to your bedroom door every morning.

Love, Dad

P.S. About that curfew. Since you'll be a college graduate, we've decided to extend it to 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.