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.

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*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.

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.  

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*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.

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….”

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.”

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.

An adventure in medical education

Retired from teaching, I may be. But I find I can still make a contribution to the education of young people.

I recently made an appointment with my doctor for my annual physical exam, and in the week before the day of the appointment, I developed a rash and a little cluster of pustules low on my posterior, at that chasm between the two halves of the body (I’ll spare you a description of the contortions I had to go through to see what was causing the painful itching I had). At about the same time, and I didn’t know whether this was related or not, I began to experience some pain urinating.

I was in an examination room when Ted opened the door. He is just a few years younger than I and has been my doctor for about 30 years. I have great confidence in him and consider him a friend. During my annual physicals we have often spent more time just chatting than with the exams themselves.

He is an avuncular, generous fellow, and over the years he has hosted students from local medical schools —always females, in my experience—who move from room to room with him as he makes his rounds. He explains to them his diagnoses of the complaints his patients bring to him and answers their questions.

Usually, he has had just one student in tow, but this time, four lovely young women with fetching smiles and wearing starched and shiny lab coats stood behind him in the doorway. He and I greeted each other and he asked why I was there. It was time for my annual physical, I said. “But I have something else I need to talk to you about.”

“What’s that?”

I looked at the smiling doctors-to-be.

“I’d rather tell you privately.”

He would be back, he said. In the meantime, he would have another young woman, a Chinese who was studying to be a nurse practitioner, go through the preliminary work. She went down the checklist about my general health, took my pulse and listened to me breathe.

Ted returned with one of the young women, and introduced her as a first-year medical student. She beamed. He told her to wait outside and dismissed the nurse practitioner student.

It was time for the piece de resistance, the digital exam of my prostate.

I took off my slacks and stood next to the examining table.

“So what’s this private matter,” he asked, as he snapped on a latex glove.

“You’ll see it when you are down there.”

“Drop your shorts.”

I did as I was told, and shorts around my ankles I bent over the table. He looked.

“Shingles,” he exclaimed. He was exuberant.

“Classic shingles,” he said, as he checked the condition of my prostate.

“Your prostate is enlarged,” he said, “and that’s because it has been infected by the shingles. There’s no evidence of an abnormality. But that’s what’s causing the pain when you urinate.”

He took off the glove. I resumed breathing.

“Would you mind if I showed the student?” He asked me.

Modesty gave me pause. “I’d hate to get her all excited.”

He laughed. “Pshaw.”

I agreed to let her see and I assumed the posture of a shy ostrich. He opened the door and asked the student in.

“Classic shingles,” he said to her. She looked at my 75-year-old nether region—I assume she looked—while he discussed the symptoms. I wondered whether she was still smiling.

When Ted finally ushered her out, I dug my face out of the examination table and dressed. He and I talked about the remedies for shingles and he prescribed a couple of pills for me to take during the next week. Then he was off to another room.

The young woman passed me without a word as I was leaving. But I understood. She probably didn’t recognize my face.