The Spectator

Naked to Mine Enemies

2011-12-29T04:43:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking of Cardinal Wolsey these days in relation to the firing of Joe Paterno as Penn State’s football coach. People continue to ask why he was fired and the board of trustees has yet to answer that question. Of course, the question becomes more prominent because as the timeline in the Sandusky sex abuse scandal is laid out, Paterno did the right thing and should be honored, not fired. Or so it seems until we get more information.

The Joe Paterno I know was no Cardinal Wolsey, who apparently while serving Henry VIII was quite the political animal and served Henry rather than the church only to have Henry turn on him late in his life. Wolsey died while enroute to London where he probably would have been executed.

I read a biography of Wolsey back in the 1960s and was struck by the title: Naked to Mine Enemies. I’m not sure Wolsey ever used the line but I do know that Shakespeare did in his play Henry VIII.

Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

As I pondered the firing of Joe Paterno and the unstated reason(s) behind it, the phrase came back to me. I finally realized that there is no unstated reason for the firing, that Paterno had over the years accumulated enough enemies that in a moment of vulnerability his enemies prevailed over his supporters. Look at all of the negative stories about Joe’s past that have been published since he was fired. Few would dare to write such stories while he was the coach.

Why was Joe fired? He stayed too long. While most people, including those in Old Main and on the board of trustees, retire at 65, Paterno kept on coaching and had enough support to get away with it. Even when he was asked to step down, he had enough power to thumb his nose at the president of Penn State and to continue coaching. Even at the conclusion of the last season, his legacy intact as the winningest Division I coach in college football, he refused to step down. He wanted one more season and seemed to suggest that there would be more after that.

Leaving aside the current sex abuse scandal, I always thought that Joe had the right values for a football coach. Certainly, he was not perfect, but his stated values were worth emulating. I long said that Joe had a right to retire on his own terms—but at the same time he should have retired a while back.

By insisting on continuing to coach, Paterno left himself naked to his enemies. In the end his vulnerability was greater than his legacy. Like it or not, he was fired.

Facts and Discussion Boards

2011-12-26T06:20:00.000-07:00

There’s a great line that we often hear in newsrooms. It’s meant as a joke, but some non-newsies might wonder.

The line goes: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The implication is that a reporter will ignore the facts in order to create a more interesting story, a story that will attract more readers than one based on facts.

Having become addicted to Facebook and newspaper discussion boards, I’m beginning to think the line is universal rather than limited to newsrooms. As I follow, in particular, the discussion at the sex abuse scandal connected in some way to Penn State, I marvel at the number of posts that are factually wrong. I marvel more when the originator is corrected and stands by his original posts.

The standard of proof is very low, unlike in any newsroom I ever worked in. Newsrooms, especially when working on controversial stories, have a two-source rule. You need at least two independent sources saying the same thing before you’ll consider putting the information in a story. And the sources can’t just be anybody.

There was a post the other day claiming that a certain downtown State College development project included a penthouse suite for former Penn State president Graham Spanier. I asked for a source. The originator said one of the developers told him that. Nothing on paper. Just hearsay.

A couple of weeks later Penn State, which had committed to two floors of office space (not a penthouse), backed out of the project and the Spaniers coincidentally purchased their own condo in a neighboring township.

That did not stop the posts about the penthouse.

Of course, the “facts” about Joe Paterno and what he did when informed of a former assistant’s behavior are as fluid as the Mississippi River. The ones that suit a person’s disposition toward Penn State or Paterno are the ones that get posted, followed by “corrections” from others.

I have enough examples to fill a book.

Now there’s an idea. A book.

When I see misinformation repeated on a discussion board, I am reminded of a quote attributed to Mark Twain (but which I can’t verify): Rumor is halfway around the world before truth gets out of the starting gate.

And that was before the Internet!

The Pill Girl

2011-12-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

Nothing like open heart surgery to increase your daily intake of pills. Before I had surgery (on Halloween, no less), I was taking six pills a day, of which two were prescription drugs and the rest over the counter.

Now I take at least 15 pills a day, spread over four time slots—breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime. And I’m not counting the pain pill I take occasionally or the two Tylenol I took the other day to clear up a massive headache, which I now think was a cold. (It’s gone and I’m feeling much better.)

My real point in writing this is not to whine. I am grateful to be alive.
I am more grateful to my wife, Paulette, who continues to be my No. 1 nurse, although she’s been replaced (by me) as my chauffeur.

It is Paulette who oversees the pills, making sure that my pillboxes are filled correctly and reminding me to take the pills. She usually puts the appropriate pillbox next to my plate when I sit down to eat.

Frankly, I’m not sure which pill does what, but Paulette knows. In fact, when any one of my doctors asked me about pills, I point to Paulette and she answers the question. She knows the dosage and frequency much better than I.

We’ve started to give the pills names. For example, there are the P pills. I take a pill twice a day to make me pee a lot to get rid of excess fluid. When you pee, you lose potassium and so along with the pee pill, I take a potassium pill. We call those two the P bills.

We celebrated the other day when my cardiologist reduced the frequency of one of my pills. At some point, I should be back to my normal six and my pill girl can retire.

Cheers for Dr Weaver

2011-10-05T07:06:00.001-06:00

When I was headed for 8th grade in 1957, I tried out for the football team. The first order of business was a physical. Turn your head. Cough. Turn the other way. Cough. Stethoscope on heart.

I don’t know if Dr Weaver broke the news on the spot or if I received it later, but the verdict was that I could not play football because I had an immature heart. (We won’t discuss all the other immature areas.)

The immature heart dogged me for years without resolution. In fact, whenever I got a physical, I would tell the physician about my immature heart and he would report

that he heard nothing.

One physician speculated that Dr Weaver figured I was too small to play football and the best way to ease me out of the situation was to use a medical excuse. Given my lack of athletic ability and low threshold for pain, I suspect I wouldn’t have lasted much beyond the first hit.

But in 2006 when I was getting my annual physical, my doctor said she heard something and sent me to a cardiologist. Lo and behold, the cardiologist determined that I had aortic stenosis, a fusing of the aortic valves, and that one day I would need surgery to correct the situation.

There are two ways you can get aortic stenosis. It can occur if you get rheumatic fever, which I’ve never had. Or you can be born that way. Given that my father and eldest sister had the same condition (and she died in surgery), I could say the condition ran in the family.

And so surgery looms. It’s scheduled for Oct 31 at Geisinger.

Technically, not my heart but generally it looks as though Dr Weaver was on to something. Bless him.

My Life in Print

2011-09-10T07:26:00.003-06:00

I came up with the title for my memoirs quite awhile ago, but I put off putting anything on paper, including a simple outline. Why? To be honest, I didn’t feel like writing and I was pretty sure no one would be interested, even if I gave them a copy for free.

One day, Tom Morin, who was my typography instructor at Santa Fe Community College and who is a graphic designer, showed me how he had formatted his memoirs, and I suddenly exclaimed: I’m ripping you off! What Tom did was combine graphic elements, including photographs, with short essays to create a visually attractive book that anyone would want to read. I had a lot of material already digitized and so it was an easy step to figuring out what my topics would be.

I came up with more written material than I had originally planned on because as the book developed I realized that I had published several essays in my blog (The Spectator) and could repurpose them in my memoirs. What’s mine is mine.
***
When I was just starting out in the newspaper business, I attended the opening of a new sports activity for young people. One of the founders took over the microphone and thanked half the known universe—except the newspaper I worked for. So I cornered him and asked rather bluntly if we had not helped get this activity off the ground.

A couple of days later our publisher showed up in the newsroom and started talking about that confrontation. But he wasn’t angry; he was pleased that I had said something, even though I had confronted a local political powerhouse.

Thus, I learned something about naming names right there and so I have kept the number of names in this memoir to a minimum. It’s not because I am not grateful; it’s because I am afraid I will leave someone unmentioned—and peeved at me forever.

Trust me. If we’ve journeyed on the same trail, you were a great help to me and I appreciate it. Take your bow.

This memoir was created for my daughters and grandchildren, and I count all others who take the time to read it as great friends—or relatives.

The Land of Fees

2011-09-09T05:34:00.002-06:00

When my wife and I were selling our house in New Mexico, the agent for the title company needed information about our mortgage so he could pay it off and close it down. But in checking on us, he discovered that we also had a home equity line of credit with the mortgage holder and he needed to close that account.

We had never drawn on the account. We paid $35 a year just to have the safety net. Fortunately, we never needed it. So imagine our surprise when we received an updated statement of closing costs hours before closing in which we were being charged $66 by Chase to end our home equity line of credit. The $66 is called the annual fee and lien release fee.

I found that unusual, given that we had paid more than $200 over the line of the line of credit just to have the line of credit and so I complained to Chase and demanded my money back. It took a couple of months, but eventually Chase turned me down and told me that it had been written into the contract we signed for the line of credit.

Who remembers what’s in a contract? Who understands them when you sign them?

Shame on me.

My new mortgage company has been after me to secure a line of credit and get one of its credit cards. Sorry, Wells Fargo, but I don’t trust you folks now that I’ve been burned by Chase.

I’m going to stick with my credit union—and this time I’m reading the fine print.

Penny Foolish

2011-05-21T10:35:00.000-06:00

I had a pocketful of change weighing me down—dimes, nickels and pennies—the other day and I wanted a candy bar. Seeing one of my favorites from years ago, I bought a Three Musketeers bar for 79 cents, gave the checkout girl eight dimes and received a penny change.

I had reduced the change in my pocket from somewhere around 140 cents to 69 cents, including nine pennies.

I do a fairly good job of limiting the amount of change in my pocket and having more than 40 or 50 cents is a lot for me. And if I have quarters, they go into a holder in the car and are used to buy coffee or feed parking meters. But I got out of my rhythm after spending nine days in Wales, which is burdened with the currency of Great Britain.

I received so many coins in Wales that the right side of my body started to sag. Consider that in the British system, there are pennies (call pence), two pence, five pence, ten pence, twenty pence and fifty pence. We in the States can relate.

But on top of the pence, the British also have a one-pound and a two-pound coin and no comparable bills. So if your change is, say 11 pounds 15, you can get a lot of coins to wear you down. I got pretty good at knowing how many pound coins I had in my pocket so I could use them and avoid filling my pocket with more weight.

I reminded one of the Welsh woman making change for me, one who shared my unhappiness with the coins, that the Australians had gotten rid of one-pence and two-pence coins in the 1990s. In fact, it happened between visits for us and I was more than happy to discover their absence. My body didn’t sag right.

It would be nice if Great Britain and the United States reduced the number of penny ante coins in the system. I understand that it cost more to make a penny than the value of the coin. Why keep making them?

An anglophile friend of mine defend the pound coins years ago by explaining to me that they last longer than paper bills and that reduces costs. You might say that the Brits are pound wise and penny foolish. But then, we are also penny foolish. In addition to getting rid of at least the penny (if not the nickel and the dime), why not convert the dollar bill to a coin? Why stop with the dollar?

I know some people will lament the death of the penny, but I haven’t seen penny candy in a long time and penny ante poker is now at least nickel-dime if not quarter-fifty.

It’s time to move on.

Review: A Famous Dog's Life

2011-05-19T13:54:00.001-06:00

When I took my copy of A Famous Dog’s Life into the exam room at my doctor’s in New Mexico, her nurse looked at the cover and asked: Is that the Taco Bell dog? Chihuahuas are everywhere in my neighborhood and I can’t tell one from the other.

I’m a little more in tune now, thanks to this book, by Sue Chipperton and Rennie Dyball, which was a good read and an education for me. Chipperton trains dogs—and other animals—for television commercials and movies and the Taco Bell dog, whose real name was Gidget, lived with Chipperton so the story is not only about Gidget’s role in commercials and movies, but their life together. Thus, we learn how and where they traveled, how they lived on the road and how Gidget—and other animals trained by Chipperton and friends—met a long list of movie stars, including my favorite Clint Eastwood.

As a freelance photographer, I learned a couple of things that might come in handy should someone ever ask me to shoot a portrait of her dog or cat. It all comes down to associating a desired behavior with a desired sound—and then a treat. That works on me, too.

Chipperton thanks Dyball for “suffering through my edits,” and I must commend Dyball, a former student of mine, for maintaining Chipperton’s voice throughout. It’s the mark of a good editor to let the right voice through, and in this book, the voice is true and consistent.

A Sabbatical in Santa Fe

2011-05-13T13:42:00.000-06:00

We had just told a writerly luncheon group I belonged to in Pennsylvania that we were moving back to Pennsylvania when one of them asked me what living in Santa Fe was like.

It was, I said, just like a sabbatical.

Actually, it was not like the two sabbaticals I had had as a college professor. I spent one of those at home writing a monograph on John O’Hara and serving an expert witness in a defamation case and I spent the other teaching journalism on English-speaking graduate students in China. But both of those sabbaticals were my idea.

When my wife, Paulette, first proposed that we retire to Santa Fe, I did hesitate. After all, I’m a ninth-generation Pennsylvanian whose ancestors arrived in colonial Philadelphia a decade after Ben Franklin had come down from Boston and my plan (if I had any) was to have my ashes scattered somewhere in the commonwealth and be done with it.

Now, after nearly eight years in Santa Fe, we are, for family reasons, moving back to Pennsylvania. In addition to being closer to my mother-in-law, I have calculated other benefits to returning, including a greater chance of seeing all of our seven grandchildren at least once a year instead of only on Skype.

But I’ve also reflected on our time in Santa Fe and can list many benefits to having lived here.

A lifelong but only superficial student of photography, upon arriving here, I immediately signed up for a workshop or two at Santa Fe Workshops. But for one of them, I needed to know a desktop publishing software I was not familiar with, and when self-teaching didn’t get me to the level I needed to be at, I turned to Santa Fe Community College, where I took a series of courses in the particular software and branched out into typography, drawing, photography-related courses and strength training for seniors.

In the meantime, my creative wife enrolled in a variety of painting courses both at the community college and Valdes Art Workshops. We each found other workshops that enabled us to get better at our artistic pursuits. Eventually, we felt confident enough in our skills to develop a joint approach to our work, which we trademarked as Pixels and Bristles® and started self-publishing books and calendars that combined my photographs and my wife’s paintings. We have others projects in mind.

We came here to retire and are leaving as business partners, something totally unexpected.

And so as we head back to Pennsylvania, we feel our best creative years lie ahead—thanks to a sabbatical in Santa Fe.

To the Cloud

2011-04-15T12:52:00.000-06:00

When I told my wife I had bought a book about clouds, she was thinking of a television commercial, not the sky above us. The book is The Cloud Collector’s Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney and is an official publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society, a British group.

The book is nicely formatted with each entry getting a two-page spread, usually with one thumbnail photo on the even-numbered page and a larger photo on the facing page. Frequently, that is followed by a full-bleed two-page spread. If that’s not enough, there is not only a standard index but also an image index, which I turn to first.

The content is delivered in a casual tone and Latin words are translated, which makes it easier to see how a particular cloud got its name. The author also has a sense of humor. For example, in writing about pannus clouds, he says: “Loitering in the saturated atmosphere just below rain clouds, they resemble some sort of cloud version of hooligans, killing time outside McDonald’s on a Saturday night.”

The only criticism I have is that the book comes in a hard cover, which makes it difficult to lie flat next to your computer as you sort through your cloud photos (which I’ve been doing for the past two days). A spiral-bound book would have been much easier to use.

Lovely just the same.

Ed Gildea and the Valley Gazette

2011-02-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Ed Gildea and I worked together at The Evening Courier in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s. I remember him as low key and a very good interviewer and writer. I once went on an assignment with him to the site of a forest fire where he interviewed a homeowner, a double-amputee, about how close the fire had come to his house. Ed was very good at getting people to talk, even in a high-stress situation such as a fire, using such “tricks” as nodding and saying “uh-huh.”

Ed died recently at the age of 82.

A 1952 Penn State journalism grad, Ed eventually left the Courier to become editor of the Times-News, and in later years he and I engaged in a scholarly exchange about journalists running for public office. I was somewhat shocked when his publisher returned one of my epistles, saying Ed no longer worked for the paper.
Ed, then in his mid-40s, had been fired.

While working at the newspaper, he started a monthly devoted mostly to history, although he included a story about the occasional current issue that wasn’t being covered by his own paper. The Valley Gazette was printed at the Times-News. At some point, Ed objected to an increase in his bill and one thing led to another. He admitted later that he had “nibbled at the hand feeding him.”

In his new life, he also started the Weekly Gazette, which focused on current issues. He was a crusader for transparent government, a clean environment and a healthy lifestyle. To that end, he was also a fervent runner. Ed didn’t just cover the issues; he became part of them. He would write letters to, say, a school board demanding answers and then publish a story about the request.

He loved consumer complaints and would name names when he could. If he couldn’t, he’d publish the address of the state consumer board for others to file a complaint.

In a story I wrote for the Penn State Journalist in June of 1974, Ed said:
“Sometimes I’ll get personally involved in a story, then stand back and write about it as though somebody else was writing it—in the third person. We have few active civic groups—no taxpayers’ associations—in the Panther Valley, so I’ve perceived it as my duty to act as a public citizen and develop issues, ask questions, initiate complaints if they seem justified and bring unprecedented light into some of the darker corners of local government. If I hear about some shady thing, I’ll dig into it and get the story if I can—and if I can't, I'll tell who won't give it to me. I keep looking for stories behind stories, and if I run into a blank wall trying to find something out I'll write a story about that.”

I don’t recall how long the weekly lasted. Ed set his own type and pasted up the paper in his house. He relied on advertising to make a modest profit, and he did admit it was modest. At some point, someone told me he had gotten a full-time job. That’s not mentioned in his obituary, but the obit does mention the Gazette.

That’s as it should be.

The speech Obama should have given

2010-12-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

My Fellow Americans:

It’s time to bite the bullet.

I’ve decided not to extend the Bush tax cuts or unemployment benefits. All we’re doing is running up our debt and that will hurt us more in the long run than a tax increase for everyone will hurt us in the short run.

We’ve lived too long on credit in this country; it must stop now.

I have decided to dedicate my presidency to reducing the federal debt. I embrace the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction proposals and will work with them and others who want to reduce our long-term debt and end tax loopholes.

Finally, I will not seek re-election. Everyone in Washington seems to focus on the next election. Bad decisions are made because of that. Because of the election cycle, we’d endured minimum oversight of our economy and maximum greed.

I want to focus on what’s best for the country. Lowering our debt and simplifying our tax code are two worthy goals. Let us together move forward toward those goals.

Thank you.

Mine Rescue Redux

2010-10-10T17:57:00.003-06:00

The other day when a news anchor said that the mine rescue in Chile brought back memories of one in Pennsylvania, I expected something about an event in 1963. Instead, the story was about a rescue of nine miners in Somerset County in 2002, the implication being that it was the model for the rescue in Chile.

But not mentioned in the report was the model for Somerset County, the first time rescuers drilled into a mine from above and pulled out miners. That happened near Sheppton, Pennsylvania, in 1963. It was quite the operation and I had the privilege as a journalist of visiting the site and seeing the rescue operation under way, although I was not present when two of the three miners were pulled through a tube to the surface. (The third miner’s body was never recovered.)

The atmosphere around the site was mixed. I remember sad family members of the trapped miners sitting glumly under a tent awaiting word. Elsewhere, a local caterer had set up to serve the rescuers and the press. I remember bumping into some of my fellow journalists, including Ray Saul of the Hazleton paper.

The man leading the rescue was a guy named H. Beecher Charmbury, who was the state’s secretary of mines and had been recruited from Penn State to run the bureau. He was credited with coming up with the idea of drilling a hole to the miners, using it to send down food and for communication, and then enlarging it enough to send a man-size cylinder to retrieve the two miners.

Shortly after the rescue, I joined the Navy and didn’t give the rescue another thought.

But I had the pleasure decades later of working with Charmbury, who had returned to Penn State and had become active in Republican politics. He was the chair of the county party and I worked with him on various events, including the annual chicken barbecue.

In the late 1980s, my wife and I formed a luncheon group called the Anthracite League and decided we would have speakers. Our first speaker was Charmbury.

He gave an excellent presentation and showed his own slides. The slides stood out because they were in black and white, which added a nice tone to his presentation.

As we cheer on the rescuers in Chile, we should remember Sheppton and Beecher Charmbury and note that a mine rescue in 1963 remains an important part of world history in 2010.

Travels With Sally

2010-10-05T07:35:00.000-06:00

My wife and I recently embarked on a trip that lasted 30 days and 6300 miles. We visited friends in Missouri, cousins in Chicago, daughters (and grandchildren) in North Carolina and New York, and friends and family in Pennsylvania.

One person I didn’t expect to encounter was my oldest sister, Sally. After all, she died 18 days before her 62nd birthday—in 1998.

On my last full day at my mother-in-law’s, I was up early (as usual) and checking e-mail (as usual) and there was a note from my older sister in New Mexico forwarded from our oldest nephew, one of Sally’s three sons, informing me that the funeral director who had presided over her services had some remaining ashes (they’re called cremains) and could I pick them up?

(For reasons not clear to me, my sister’s wishes to have some of her cremains scattered at the childhood home were not followed. For other reasons not clear to me, I don’t know why the funeral director still had some of her cremains. And the background on why there was a sudden interest in scattering her cremains at the childhood home is family business and not fodder for blogs.)

The arrangements made, I called my nephew from my car after picking up the cremains and we agreed that I should leave some of them at the house where my mother, sisters and I lived with my grandparents after my parents separated. (Sally would have been about 13 then.) My grandfather was the caretaker of a company-owned reservoir, and while we didn’t live there more than five years it is the place from which we draw many of our fondest childhood memories. It was where uncles, aunts and cousins gathered and played even before we arrived.

I called my older sister and informed her of the plan and said I knew the place to scatter some of the cremains. I had been at the house a couple of days before, taking photographs (with permission of the owner), and had noticed a modest three railroad tie footbridge across the road. I remembered going over to the spot when I lived there and told my sister that’s where I would scatter some of the cremains.
“Oh,” my sister said, “that was Sally’s favorite place.”

I had no idea.

Later that day I scattered some of Sally’s cremains under a baby pine tree. When I reported that I had accomplished the mission, my older sister said it was probably Sally’s happiest day.

Mine, too.

Harriet and Mr. Nobody

2010-08-02T15:41:00.001-06:00

The dust jacket for Harriet and Mr. Nobody

I'm pleased to announce that the memoirs of Mike Casino, who grew up in Tamaqua, graduated from St. Jerome's, and retired from a long journalism career as an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirier, has been published by Coal Cracker Press and is available at www.lulu.com. Here are comments from the publisher and a friend of Mike's.

From the publisher

When I worked at the Evening Courier in Tamaqua right out of high school in 1961, I was told about Mike Casino and how he had once worked at the Courier and now worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The point was that you could make it to the big newspaper from the little newspaper. (And eventually I did spend a summer on the Inkie’s metropolitan copy desk as a faculty intern but Mike had long been retired.)

Fifty years later I was surprised when reading one of my hometown newspapers to learn that Mike was still alive, had just celebrated his 100th birthday and wanted someone to publish his memoirs. I immediately sent him a letter volunteering to do that through an online print-on-demand publisher.

A few weeks later I got an e-mail from Francis Clifford, whom I knew from my days in Tamaqua, and who was a friend of Mike’s (and you’ll learn more in these pages). He had Mike’s manuscript and was interested in my proposal.

Alas, Mike died in the meantime and we let the project go until last year when I contacted Francis and suggested we publish the manuscript lest Mike’s story perish. Francis agreed and you are about to read that wonderful story.

Mike wrote his memoirs in the third person and made his wife, Harriet, the lead character. That’s understandable, for surely, she was the love and rock in his life. Despite being in what we in Tamaqua would call a “mixed marriage” (a Catholic and a Protestant), Mike and Harriet had a marriage made in Heaven, one that will endure for eternity.

Beyond the personal story, I consider this a great Tamaqua story and a great American story.

R Thomas Berner

Santa Fe, New Mexico

From a Family Friend

For more than 30 years, I lived less than a hour’s drive from Mike and Harriet in suburban Philadelphia. My mother, Mary, who died in 1986, was still living on Hunter Street in Tamaqua where Mike grew up, would occasionally ask if I had visited them, but life with an active family of four children held me captive in Delaware County. Finally in late 2005 following my wife’s death, I learned that Mike had taken up residence at St. Mary Manor in Lansdale. I called him, introduced myself, and made arrangements to visit.

During that initial telephone call he told me about his memoirs. He had completed most of the text and had handed the manuscript to a typist for corrections and modifications. He sent me a copy of the manuscript, asking for my review. I circled a multitude of things for change or correction. During our first meeting, we spent more than three and a half hours going over every word and punctuation mark I had noted, he, at age 98, defending vigorously his position on each one during our sometimes intense, but cordial, exchanges.

I spent many hours with Mike from that first visit until the week before his death. I was also fortunate to have known his mother, whom I remember from my childhood, passing her house hundreds of times on my way to and from home just up the street. Until his death, he possessed a keen intellect, memory, and sense of humor, and we engaged in many topical arguments and shared many a laugh over a meal at his and Harriet’s favorite restaurant, Roy Ann’s on Old Bethlehem Pike in Sellersville, Montgomery County.

Marian High School is the unified successor to three church high schools in the area, one of which was St. Jerome in Tamaqua, Mike’s alma mater. I took Mike to Marian’s commencement in June 2007, where he had his photo taken with a young woman about to graduate. They were both valedictorians of their respective classes, but 80 years apart. What a moment to witness! I also had the extraordinarily rare opportunity that most people never experience in life —calling a person and extending good wishes on his 100^th birthday. I recited the Italian toast, “Cent’anni!” (May you live a hundred years!) when I served as master of ceremonies at his 100^th birthday party.

Francis J. Clifford, Esq.

Department of the Navy

Washington, D.C.

Postcards from my Father: A World War II Story

2010-07-27T15:56:00.001-06:00

Under duress, I started downsizing through digitizing, going through box after box that I had hoped to leave for my daughters to be opened upon my death. Let them sort it out, I always said.

But my wife had other ideas and ordered me to downsize. Duress soon turned to joy as I found many things I had forgotten I had and I cheerfully scanned them into folders for my daughters and threw away all but the originals that predated me.

Then came one of the biggest surprises of all—postcards my father had sent to me during World War II. It was all the more surprising when you consider that my parents separated when I was 5 yet my mother kept several items that were my father’s with the intention that they someday go to me.

My father told my eldest sister in a taped interview that he had been drafted on March 15, 1944, five days after I was born. His induction papers are dated March 16.

He first went to boot camp in Virginia and then on to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington, and that’s where the postage-free postcards begin.

“I hear that Mommy upset you off of the sleigh. Did you get any snow in your face? I’d throw snowballs at her. Be good. Love Daddy.”

A few months later:

“What’s new Joe?” he asked in another, which is dated Jan. 12, 1945, and shows a garden in Chicago, which I’m assuming he stopped at enroute from Virginia to Washington. “I suppose by now you weigh 19 lbs. So you have been riding your dog. I suppose next you will want a pony. Be good. Love Daddy.”

Then the postmarks and the pictures change and there are scenes of France and a mark that says PASSED BY ARMY EXAMINER appears on every card. I know from the interview my eldest sister taped that he eventually ended up in Marseille, France (my ship stopped there in the 60s on one of my Med cruises, but I had no idea that another Berner had been there before me), and then was shipped via the Panama Canal to Clark Airfield in the Philippines after Japan had surrendered.

There are no postcards after France, but thanks to my mother, there are the memories of things I was too young to remember.

2010-07-09T15:57:00.002-06:00

The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Biography of Stieg Larsson. Barry Forshaw. John Blake Publishing, Ltd., London. 2010. 294 pp.

Like many others, I got hooked on Stieg Larssons’ Millennium trilogy when I first saw the Swedish movie “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” I immediately bought that book and the second, The Girl Who Played with Fire (and now a movie), and pre-ordered the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (or as it was spelled in the United States, Hornet’s Nest). Likewise, when I learned that Larsson’s biography was in the works, I pre-ordered that too.

Sadly, I must report that The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Biography of Stieg Larsson is not Larsson’s biography. If it’s anything, it is a journalistic mish-mash of facts, interviews, comments and book summaries, with digressions on, among others, Sonny Mehta, Leonard Bernstein, deceased legendary writers of mysteries and several live Swedish writers.

Forshaw, identified as the author of British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia and The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, hedges his bets in the introduction by saying that Larsson’s biography “is, to some extent, to be found in his books—hence the concentration here on the three novels of his trilogy, with biography data built into these sections rather than hived off into separate chapters (though his life is addressed separately).”

So when Forshaw devotes three chapters and 151 pages (out of 294) to summarizing each one of the books and occasionally pointing out parallels between Larsson and his central character, Mikael Blomkvist, we are supposed to be getting biography. Blomkvist is anti-fascist and pro-feminist and so was Larsson. Because this biography is aimed at those who read the trilogy, this bit of information comes as no surprise. It didn’t take much to read into the first novel that Blomkvist, a magazine editor and crusading journalist, is Larsson’s fictional self.

Forshaw repeats himself so much that either he or his editor began inserting parenthetical or bracketed asides such as (as mentioned earlier) and [as noted earlier], so we know we aren’t getting new information. After a while you begin to think no one edited the book.

The book does not have a bibliography or an index. Most of it, according to Forshaw’s credits, is based on interviews, which he quotes extensively and uncritically. Contradictions are allowed to stand and thus detract from the book. One that stood out is attributed to Larsson’s significant other, Eva Gabrielsson, who claims that Larsson was not a workaholic. Later, others, including Larsson’s publisher, state that he was a workaholic, and Forshaw does not take sides, although the front inside flap of the dust cover, usually written by the author, states unequivocally that he was. Was he or wasn’t he? His biographer doesn’t say within the text proper. (And what’s wrong with being a workaholic?)

But (as mentioned earlier) this isn’t really a biography. After the three chapters of book summaries, Forshaw presents a chapter titled “Stieg’s Rivals: Scandinavian Crime Fiction.” I’m guessing he relied heavily on his previous writings for that chapter. It read like padding to me.

That chapter was followed by “The Millennium Tour: In Larsson’s Footsteps,” which also read like padding.

The penultimate chapter is titled “The Responses: Writers on Stieg Larsson.” This chapter could have been interesting, but it’s structured in such a way that it’s boring. Forshaw introduces a writer and his or her works and then quotes their comments on Larsson. The chapter goes on and on like that without any synthesis or analysis on Forshaw’s part. One of the more interesting things we do learn in all of this droning is that Larsson changed the spelling of his given name from Stig to Stieg so he wouldn’t be confused with another writer named Stig Larsson.

Those who have read the trilogy because they admire Lisbeth Salander will be pleased to know that Larsson, according to his father, may have used Larsson’s niece as a model. The niece suffers from anorexia nervosa, does have a tattoo, is dyslexic and is highly computer literate. However, she’s never interviewed by Forshaw.

Finally, there is the information that Larsson was actually thinking of writing 10 books. A friend and I discussed what the fourth book might be and we could only come with one or two possibilities and they would have been stretches. So let’s say that ending at three works well, although it is sad that it had to end because of Larsson’s premature death from a heart attack (because he was a workaholic?).

The bottom line for this biography of Stieg Larsson is that Stieg Larsson is all but missing. A real biography is yet to come.

Something Negative Turned Out Positive

2010-06-23T16:06:00.000-06:00

I don’t remember why my mother bought me a camera, but I can pretty much date the arrival of the Brownie Hawkeye into my life as 1954—or 1955. I know that because I have all of the photos from that period and some have dates on them.

I kept an album and the photos were stuck onto a page with black sticky corners. You had to lick them and they tasted terrible, but I endured. I may have graduated to a wet sponge eventually. I don’t remember.

Sometime after I married, my mother must have given me the album. There were fuzzy photos of a rampaging Little Schuylkill during the flood of 1955. And of a bus trip we 5th graders at Arlington Street School took to Valley Forge. When one of my classmates died, I sent a photo of him at Valley Forge to his widow.

Some photographs show friends playing basketball at the East End Playground. Later photographs show the town celebrating its 125th anniversary, which honored the Native American. We were taught that the name of our town, Tamaqua, was Indian in origin.

Other photographs show my train set and my younger cousins watching my trains. Then there was a trip to the Jersey shore with cousins.

Eventually I graduated to color and I have those photos, too. The sticky corners didn’t hold up after all these years and I removed most of the photos from the album, although I kept the album and the photos and stuck them in a box with other albums, the box relegated to a shelf or two in our garage.

What I lost in all those years were the negatives. Not that I needed them. I had the photos.

The other day I was rummaging through some boxes that contain photographs and newspaper clips acquired by my 95-year-old mother. I am creating a legacy DVD for children, sisters and cousins, mostly photographs that predate me (although I couldn’t resist including some of myself as an adult).

One of the envelopes that my mother had saved all these years was stuffed with square negatives. I dismissed the first envelope, but a few hours later gave it a second thought when I came across a second envelope and held one of the negatives up to the light.

It was Mr. Dillon! A neighbor in the 600 block of Arlington Street. Another showed young boys roasting hot dogs or marshmallows around a campfire. I recognized the negatives because I had taken the photos. What a great find!

I don’t know that I’ll be scanning any of the negatives, but just knowing that I have them after all these years is a good feeling. As a friend put, “Something negative turned out positive.” Bad pun, but nice sentiment.

Service Above and Beyond

2010-06-07T13:57:00.001-06:00

A couple of months ago I needed to get a quick oil change before we took a long weekend trip. I dropped in to a nearby Jiffy Lube and my car was quickly on the rack and everything taken care. In the meantime, I waited in a pleasant room with free coffee, soft drinks and popcorn. (I had some popcorn.)

When my car was ready and my bill paid, the service manager walked me to my car, opened the door for me and handed me my keys, all while expressing gratitude for my business. The mechanic who worked on my car waved from his service bay and then thanked me and urged me to come again.

Last week when major service on my car was completed at the dealership where I bought it, the service agent went through everything that had been done to the car and explained what it all meant. This is routine for this dealer, but in light of Jiffy Lube and Santa Fe Imaging, I took greater note.

If you’ve read my previous blog entry, you know that I complained about lousy service after getting an aorta ultrasound. I’m still waiting for a response from the imaging service and I’m beginning to suspect I’m not going to get one.

Medical service, of course, is life and death and it would be difficult to declare that I’m not going there again, etc. In the case of the imaging service, my doctor said it’s the only one in town that could perform what she wanted.

Be that as it may, the contrast between Jiffy Lube and Santa Fe Imaging is noteworthy. I mentioned it to my wife and we both agreed that given the economic climate, it’s good business to pay attention to customers no matter how little they spend.

Doesn’t the Walmart greeter make you feel good? Even the people who check your purchases at the door at Sam’s wish you a good day as if they really mean it and you want to respond in kind.

If the downturn in the economy has meant one thing, it may be more touchy-feel treatment from providers of all kinds of service, from the mechanic in the service bay who changes your oil to the owner of a restaurant.

I hope that when (not if) the economy improves, the treatment continues.

It makes my day.

Body Parts

2010-05-23T19:20:00.003-06:00

I think this speaks for itself.

Professional Relations
Santa Fe Imaging
1640 Hospital Drive
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505

Your comment form does not provide me with the space I need to comment.

When I first called Santa Fe Imaging to make an appointment, I told the person who answered the phone that I needed an aorta ultrasound. She replied: “Which part of the body is that?”

After she figured it out and we agreed on a date, she told me to drink 24 ounces of water before the appointment and to hold it. When I arrived for my appointment, my bladder nearly bursting, the appointment clerk realized that I should have been fasting, not feasting and rescheduled the appointment.

A day before the appointment someone called to make sure all was in order and I repeated the above story. She said that the temps didn’t always know medical terminology, to which I replied: Aorta seems to me to be basic biology.

During this phone call, by the way, your person used the word “kidney” and I challenged her. I pointed out that this procedure had nothing to do with my kidney. She double checked the records and agreed.

I fasted, I arrived on time, I was promptly recorded and soon taken to a room where the correct procedure was done professionally by someone named Charlie.

Other than scheduling, which I’d give a 1 to, everyone else on your form rates a 6.

Needless to say, just repeating the which body part question will get me a lot of laughs at parties.

Sincerely,

Tales from Coal Country

2010-04-04T07:30:00.001-06:00

The Black Rock That Built America: A Tribute to the Anthracite Coal Miners, By Gerald L McKerns C.C., Xlibris, 2007, 134pp. (Available at http://www.geraldmckerns.com/)

This compact history of the Anthracite region of Pennsylvania comes with a lot of local anecdotes and personal insights one would not find in an academic history. That in itself makes it an interesting addition to the history and lore of the hard coal country.

McKerns was born in St. Nicholas, a company “town” just outside Mahanoy City in Schuylkill County. McKerns refers to St. Nicholas as a “patch,” which are small clusters of homes in between towns. Before bypasses, rerouted highways and Interstates, you went through a lot of patches driving from Point A to Point B. McKerns tells us some of what happened in the towns and patches and that is a welcome addition to any Coal Cracker’s history. (That’s what the C.C. stands for in McKern’s byline.)

For example, I did not know about that the religious differences in Mahanoy City were manifested in the membership of its two fire companies—one Irish Catholic and one Welsh Protestant. Summoned by an alarm that was a pretext for a fight, members of the companies met in downtown Mahanoy City. Shooting and death followed. Being of Welsh descent and as a former member of the historically Protestant fire company in Tamaqua, I understand—but don’t endorse—the division and am glad that today cooperation among coal region fire companies and diversity of membership is first and foremost.

The book is filled with many tidbits, some of which McKerns remembers from his youth, stories told, as he says, by “old timers who shared with me their tears and tales of days gone by.” McKerns tells of the day he witnessed the unsuccessful rescue of a miner while the miner’s son watched. The next day McKerns was asked to serve as an altar boy at a funeral mass and at the mass as he looked down the aisle at the grieving family walking in he recognized the miner’s son. “Just the other day,” he writes, “I watched men remove dirt that covered a miner who was in a hole in the ground and today men will put that miner in a hole in the ground and cover him with dirt.”

McKerns devotes one chapter to the Sheppton mine cave-in of 1963, which as a reporter for the Tamaqua newspaper I vividly remember. For coal region history buffs, that chapter alone is worth the price of the book. The book includes many old photographs and drawings, some of which, such as the cover, were done by the author.

McKerns ends on the optimistic note that coal will be king again. I’m skeptical myself, but having grown up at a time when coal mines were being shuttered and thousands of men were losing their jobs, I understand McKerns’ hope for a comeback.

One thing that would have made this book much better is an index. Still, I will place it on my bookshelf with my other coal region books and pass it on to my children at the appropriate time, which I hope is a long way off.

No Greater Love

2010-04-02T15:40:00.002-06:00

My Hero My Son, The true story of Sgt. Andrew J. Baddick, an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq, by Joseph Baddick, BookSurge/CreateSpace, 2010, 277pp.

John 15:13—Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (Douay-Rheims Bible)

This book honors the life—and sacrifice—of a soldier who rescued a fellow soldier from drowning in a canal in Iraq, and then when told that another soldier was still in the water, jumped back in to save him, only to lose his own life.

One would expect a book by a father about his late son, both of whom served in the 82nd Airborne at different times, would be highly emotional, but Joe Baddick avoids over-the-top language and lets you decide when to sigh and when to cry. Joe writes in an original and detached style, almost as if he’s telling someone else’s story sitting in his living room or at a local bar. There are no cliff-hanger endings. The story is told simply and sequentially.

Joe gives readers some background on the Pennsylvania Coal Region so we can better understand him and A.J. (as he’s known) and then he takes us through A.J.’s childhood (which includes Joe's divorce and remarriage). Joe and I both grew up in Tamaqua, although I don’t know him. It turns out that enlisting in the Army did for A.J. what it did for a lot of us in the Region—it gave us a free ticket out of town and taught us how to focus on something.

Joe reproduces the official report on A.J.’s death, but also includes comments from other soldiers who served with him. There are just some things official reports don’t tell you that you’re glad to learn.

“Writing this book,” Joe says at the end, “has been a journey for me, back to happier times, interesting times, fun times, and sad times. In talking to other families [who lost their lives in war], I found out that our sons led very similar lives. They were loving, humorous, dedicated, professional, and seemed to be cut from the same special cloth that made them who they were, a breed apart from all others.”

In addition to all of the personal information, Joe describes two private meetings that families of soldiers killed in the war had with President Bush. Joe reports that at the first one when Joe’s wife started to tear up, the president put his arm around her and said, “Let’s cry together.” Joe calls Bush “the real article” and includes two photos, one of Bush holding Joe’s granddaughter, Andi Rose.

The title of this essay is meant to convey two meanings. One, of course, is A.J.’s sacrifice. The other is Joe’s love for his son. No greater love.

User Fees and Parking

2010-03-28T10:57:00.000-06:00

I receive a newsletter from Arthur Frommer, a name you may recognize if you travel and buy travel guides. I usually skim and then delete his newsletters, but I saved one to use as a take-off point in an essay.

In a recent newsletter, Frommer complains (I actually want to say “whines”) because the application fee for a visa (not the credit card) was being increased to $150 per person and the fee for obtaining a passport was being increased to $135.

I found a slightly lower figure at www.state.gov, but that doesn’t mean the fee is not proposed to increase at some point. Whatever, it doesn’t invalidate what I’m about to comment on, and that is Frommer’s statement, to wit:

“So once again, instead of funding the cost of running the State Department from general tax revenues (which is the fair way to do it), we are charging a user's fee that is a burden not to our well-off citizens but to Americans of low income. $135 for a passport!”

Fair to whom?
What set me off is Frommer’s feeling that the State Department should not recover reasonable costs, such as the costs of processing visa and passport applications, that it should all be funded by taxpayers. Take his argument to its logical (it’s actually illogical!) conclusion and you have the taxpayers subsidizing all kinds of fees.

Think about all of the things individuals seek from government that have some processing time connected to them and, hence, a fee. A journalist wants a copy of a document s/he should pay a reasonable fee for the copy. Real estate agents wants a list of deed transfers; pay for it.

What lies at the bottom of Frommer’s thinking is what I call the free parking space mindset. No matter where I’ve lived, people have complained because they’ve had to pay to park.

Why can’t parking be free? they ask.

If parking were free, there would be no parking because the first ones to the space would sit there all day.

But parking is free at the mall, some argue.

Not really. When the mall is built and the owner calculates rents, he factors in every one of his costs, including what it cost him to build a parking lot, stripe it and maintain it.

There’s no such thing as a free parking space.

And, while I’m at it, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free travel guide.

So get over it, Mr. Frommer, and everyone else.

Canyon de Chelly

2010-03-23T13:13:00.006-06:00

Acting on the advice of friends, Paulette and I signed up for an Elderhostel trip (just as Elderhostel was changing its name to Exploritas). We went to Canyon de Chelly in nearby Chinle, Arizona. It is a national monument and, to quote the National Park Service:

Reflecting one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes of North America, the cultural resources of Canyon de Chelly include distinctive architecture, artifacts, and rock imagery while exhibiting remarkable preservation integrity that provides outstanding opportunities for study and contemplation. Canyon de Chelly also sustains a living community of Navajo people, who are connected to a landscape of great historical and spiritual significance. Canyon de Chelly is unique among National Park service units, as it is comprised entirely of Navajo Tribal Trust Land that remains home to the canyon community. NPS works in partnership with the Navajo Nation to manage park resources and sustain the living Navajo community.

We took the first date available in 2010 and it happened to coincide with my birthday (and I’m showing off my new bolo in the accompanying photo). As part of the program, we were taken on a guided tour of the South Rim and the canyon floor a thousand feet below and sat through several interesting and worthwhile lectures about the Navajo. When we left, we drove along the North Rim and stopped at every outlook. A snowstorm had hit overnight and was continuing off and on as we stopped and photographed.

Once back in Santa Fe, we culled our photographs and then Paulette picked up her brush and created her own interpretations of Canyon de Chelly. So here they are—pixels and bristles™.

Table of contents
Homage to Edward S. Curtis 1
South Rim View 2-3
Teysi Overlook 4-5, 6
South Rim View 7-13
Spider Rock 14
Ring 15
White House from the Canyon Floor 16-17
White House from the South Rim 18
Standing Cow Ruin 19
The Bayeaux Tapestry of Canyon de Chelly 20
Rock Art 22-23
Canyon Floor 24-25
First Ruin 26
Horses 27
Hogan 28-29
Canyon Floor Image 30-35
Canyon Floor 36-39
Canyon Floor Trees 40-41
Antelope House 42-43
Antelope House from the North Rim 44
Antelope 45
North Rim View 46-57
Paulette on the North Rim 58
Outside Our Motel 59
The Story Behind Pixels and BristlesTM 60

Inflame or inform? That is the question.

2010-03-19T12:03:00.000-06:00

The lead on a recent story from the Philadelphia Inquirer caught my eye on Facebook and so I went to the story to read it in full. Here’s the lead:

In a quick hearing in a crowded federal courtroom, Colleen "JihadJane" LaRose of Pennsburg pleaded not guilty yesterday to terrorism charges.

I had been only marginally following this story, but I knew enough to know who “JihadJane” was. What raised my eyebrow was the use of her nickname in the lead. I wonder if it was necessary. If you read the entire story, you will come across this five paragraphs after the lead:

LaRose, who called herself "JihadJane" and "Fatima LaRose" in scores of online postings avowing hatred for U.S. policies toward Muslims, is accused of stealing an ex-boyfriend's passport and aiding the plot of a group of Islamic dissidents in Europe to kill Lars Vilks, who depicted Muhammad with the body of a dog in 2007.

I do think it’s legitimate to provide that information, but I’m troubled that it’s part of the lead. In the lead, it’s inflammatory, not informative. In paragraph five, it’s informative.

Consider the New York Times’ lead:

The Pennsylvania woman accused of recruiting men on the Internet to wage jihad in southern Asia and Europe pleaded not guilty Thursday to all counts in federal court in Philadelphia.

That lead informs rather than inflames. The second paragraph of the story also informs:

The authorities say the woman, Colleen R. LaRose, is a terrorist sympathizer known by her Internet name, “JihadJane,” and had expressed a desire to become a martyr for an Islamist cause.

I did a quick Internet search and found other news organizations publishing leads that were more along the lines of the Inquirer’s. I’m disappointed, but not surprised. I don’t know what others want, but I want more information and less inflammation in my news. That’s what news should be and I hope the story in the Inquirer is the exception, not the rule, for that news outlet and many others.

O, Toyota

2010-03-19T08:37:00.000-06:00

If someone is walking or driving behind me when I back out of a parking space, my car starts to beep and a red light on my dashboard blinks. When I pulled into the space and maybe got too close to the opposing car, the same thing happened, only the sound was different so I could distinguish where the problem was.

On the open highway, of which there are many in New Mexico, I’m quick to set the cruise control for the maximum speed limit. The cruise control in my car is ideal because it will slow me down when I get too close to the car in front of me and it will even sound an alarm if I get real close.

It does have a tendency when I pull into the passing lane in such situations to go into a quick acceleration mode that exceeds the set speed limit, but then it settles back to the right speed and I continue on my way.

It’s a comfortable car that despite its youth of six years we’ve already put more than 100,000 miles on. It’s good for road trips.

The only problem with our car is that it’s a Toyota, a 2004 Sienna XLE, complete with a DVD player for the grandchildren, heated front seats and lots of room to stow luggage, folding chairs and tripods. We’ve hauled queen-size mattresses, a wine cooler, futons and day beds in it. It has had great value for us.

But I have to wonder what value it has given Toyota’s current problems.

We’ve debated whether or not we want to trade it in. When we’ve mentioned that in the past, some people have said, Oh, it’s a Toyota, you can get 200,000 miles or 300,000 miles on it.

We were not sure we wanted to wait that long. So we laid down a marker for when we would get a new car—when we put 135,000 on this one. That was before Toyota’s current problems, none of which we’ve experienced, by the way. Our car has been all but recall free. You have to wonder what went wrong a Toyota since 2004.

Suddenly a trade isn’t looking too good. Despite its quality, our Toyota has lost value beyond the Blue Book’s numbers (between $7400 and $9000). I would imagine I could trade for another Toyota and get better than average on the Blue Book, but what if Toyota hasn’t solved its problems or what if Toyota doesn’t even exist anymore? I am not a risk taker.

So we’ve decided that as long as it runs well, we’re going to keep it until it has no value at all. Just when we thought we had a good car. Well, at least we don’t have car payments. Maybe that’s our car’s value.

Saving Diane Denish

2010-03-16T15:36:00.001-06:00

It’s presumptuous of me, a lifelong Republican, to offer advice to the Democrats, but I’m also a bit of a non-partisan politician junkie and enjoy good analysis regardless of affiliation. So this is my good analysis.

They may not want to admit it, but the Democrats in New Mexico have some problems. Republicans not only smell blood; they can taste it. All they have to say is ethics, and voters pay attention. Everyone knows which party is rife with ethical problems (for now).

And let’s be honest, the unindicted albatross in the Democratic party is the governor, Bill Richardson. We all know that the Republicans are going to run against Richardson-Denish just as the Democrats ran against Bush-McCain.

Wasn’t fair to McCain; isn’t fair to Denish.

But all’s fair in politics (sadly), and so I’m going to offer my advice to the Democrats, advice that might let them keep the governor’s office for another four years. James Carville would charge you a million dollars for this. I’m giving it to Democrats for free.

Bill Richardson must resign immediately.

That would make Lieutenant Governor Denish the governor. She would be completely divorced from Richardson; she would be her own woman. No more albatross. With Richardson gone, she could make policies that would clearly be hers and would clearly separate her from Richardson.

Richardson has nothing to gain by completing his term. He’s the George Bush of New Mexico and I don’t see what he can do to reverse that in the little time remaining.
But in the little time remaining, Denish could lay down her own markers and mute—or at least mitigate—Republican campaign rhetoric about her ethics.

Let the games begin.

Continental Beer Wars

2010-03-02T10:07:00.000-07:00

I’m sure that many people reading this piece will be shocked to learn that when I was growing up in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, I always associated Yuengling with ice cream,* not with beer. In fact, when I took up drinking beer after joining the fire company, my favorite beer was Bavarian, brewed in Mount Carbon near Pottsville, home to Yuengling.

So you can imagine my surprise when a colleague at Penn State offered me a beer one day and handed me a Yuengling. As I advanced in age and the quality of beer began to decline across the country, I finally started drinking Yuengling’s Lord Chesterfield Ale. (When I drink beer now, it’s usually Santa Fe Pale Ale.)

So it was with great interest that I listened when some news announcer said that President Obama had wagered a case of Yuengling to a case of Molson in the U.S.-Canada hockey championship in the Olympics.

The Games in Vancouver may be over, the Yuengling-Molson wager was just one more round in a series that is older than most of us.

You see, Yuengling bills itself as “America’s Oldest Brewery.” Molson, founded in 1786 to Yuengling’s 1829, once took exception to that claim. Molson argued that “America” doesn’t mean the United States, but, in fact, the continent that encompasses Canada, the United States, Mexico and maybe even more points south than I can name off the top of my head.

Not so, argued Yuengling before a U.S. trademark court in 1998. Everyone knows America means the United States.

Well, yes and no.

As an editor, I learned a long time ago from the Associated Press that the use of the word American should not be limited “to citizens or residents of the United States,” that the word can refer to any resident from Iqaluit on Baffin Island to Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia. In one of my editing texts I show a misuse of the word America:

Keep in mind, too, that America is two continents and several islands large and is not confined to the United States. The wire service reporter who wrote that "Cuban president Fidel Castro came to America today …" probably flunked geography. After all, Cuba is part of America and, as the sentence concludes, Castro knew where he was--"I'm glad to be in the United States."

But when I was teaching in China in 1994, the foreign experts from Canada called themselves “Canadians,” not Americans, and those of us carrying U.S. passports were called “Americans,” even by the Canadians. My friends in Australia refer to us as Americans, although I’ve heard the occasional “Yanks,” said more in sarcasm than respect.

And in 1998 the U.S. (not American) trademark court sided with Yuengling and agreed that its claim to be America’s Oldest Brewery was not continental, but country specific.

I doubt that anyone cares which brewery is the oldest or even whether the breweries are both American. I drink the beer I drink because I like it. I don’t even know if my favorite microbrewer advertises. If it does, I don’t recall the ads.

So there you have it. The U.S. team lost to the Canadian team and the prime minister of Canada won a case of Yuengling.

From where I sit, he got the better beer, regardless of age or national origin.

*During Prohibition, Yuengling made ice cream. That business was closed in 1981.

On the Death of a Poker Buddy

2010-02-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

A poker buddy from long ago has died and that naturally starts me reminiscing.

In this case, the deceased was also a colleague of mine in the College of Communications at Penn State and a kindred spirit in distance education. His name was Marlowe Froke and he died Feb. 23. He was 82.

Marlowe had many virtues, but one of his strongest was his humility and unassuming manner. He was never loud. He seldom raised his voice when angry, although I did a couple of sharp e-mails from him when he didn’t like something I wrote. But he never mentioned those things at poker.

At poker his unassuming manner served him well. He could play, unassumingly, for hours and lose most of the hands. Sometimes he even raised outrageously—or as outrageously as our nickel-dime-quarter-fifty-cent game allowed—only to show a losing hand, a hand he should have folded sooner.

Then sometime around an hour before closing, he’d do it again and everyone stayed because they knew they had him beat.

Only they didn’t.

He had a great hand and it was, as we like to say, well hidden. That is, you couldn’t tell from the four up cards what his three hole cards were. So he might show two 5s, an 8 and a Jack or two hearts, a club and a spade and then turn over three aces or three hearts for a full boat or a flush. We were all thinking our measly two pair would easily beat him.

And when he won, he just raked in the pot. He didn’t brag. And when we all kept saying “Nice hand, Marlowe,” he would nod and say thank you and almost act embarrassed that he had taken our money and try to change the subject.
As you might imagine, we told a lot of jokes at our games. In fact, we tried to remember the jokes we heard during the month so we could repeat them at the next poker game. Some of us were better joke tellers than others.

Marlowe was unique.

He didn’t tell many jokes, so when he started to tell one we listened.

He would get to about the second line of the joke and start laughing.

By the fourth line he was laughing louder and louder and start to tear up.

By the sixth line, the tears were rolling down his cheeks and we were all laughing.

I don’t remember any of the punch lines from Marlowe’s jokes, but I’ll never forget the way he told them.

It was vintage Marlowe.

Is La Paz About to Bloom?

2010-02-22T08:45:00.002-07:00

In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck said that La Paz had a “home” feeling to it, but he was concerned because a new hotel being built on the water’s edge would mean more tourists and soon the capital of Baja California Sur would “bloom with a Floridian ugliness.”

That was 1940. If Steinbeck had been with us on a recent one-week vacation with friends, he might have realized his prediction seemed to be on the verge of coming true 70 years later.

We had gone to La Paz with friends who traded their time share in Cabo San Lucas for one in La Paz. Our research indicated we would be visiting an authentic Mexican town, more like San Miguel Allende than Cabo San Lucas—real people, not tourists.

In that regard, we were not disappointed. We endured friendly natives, uneven sidewalks, potholed streets, unmarked one-way streets, blaring music from stores, sidewalk vendors who served locals, and shops closed during the afternoon for siesta. But we were also concerned by the number of condominiums and resort-marinas being built on the way to the beaches north of town. Homes advertised as selling in the low 400s and an elaborate gated community cut into the hillside overlooking the bay. We saw a Gary Player golf course under construction. Real estate guides are ubiquitous as the seagulls. The big-box stores familiar to anyone in the United States are clustered at the end of town toward the airport. Our tour guide told us that Americans (Canada and United States) and Germans were the dominant expatriates living there.

It wasn’t hard to see what attracts expatriates to La Paz, a city of 200,000, and why it is starting to bloom. In addition to friendly people, the food is excellent and the streets are safe. La Paz is on the eastern side of the Baja Peninsula, but situated along the Bay of La Paz in such a way that we could watch sunsets from an outdoor restaurant while sipping margaritas and beer. The weather when we were there was mild (50 to 78 degrees) and I wore short-sleeve T-shirts day and night and switched from blue jeans to my lightweight travel trousers upon arrival.

Across from our favorite watering hole was the 3.5-mile boardwalk or malecón (recently extended to the condo development north of the city). It is a favorite of the locals, who walk, jog, bike, rollerblade and exercise their dogs there, sometimes not cleaning up after their dogs. The orientation leader at our timeshare described the malecón as “an enjoyment place for everybody.” The street along the malecón is very busy and needs to be carefully negotiated by pedestrians. Jaywalking is not advised. At night, unfortunately, the street is the scene of cruising (and sometimes speeding) cars with loud radios blaring late into the evening, disruptive to those trying to sleep just a block or two in from the boardwalk.

Driving in La Paz took some getting used to because of the number of unmarked one-way streets and four-way stop signs that were suggestions, not absolutes, and ignored at intersections with lighter traffic. Our city tour guide, a native Mexican who once lived in Los Angeles, said the rule was: “You go first—after me.” Drivers would approach an intersection, slow down, and if they calculated that they had arrived first, speed up through the intersection. I saw it as a game of Mexican chicken.

Some of what is best about La Paz is not in the city, but outside and to the north—the beaches and the opportunities in the bay—snorkeling, kayaking, diving, sailing. Before deciding where to swim among the 10 beaches, we drove to each one. The last was Playa Tecolote, which is a launch point for those who want to go to Isla Espiritu Santo, a nearly 24,000-acre home to a variety of sea and bird life. We had a choice of three tour companies and eventually selected the least expensive after failing to negotiate lower prices with the first two. (The price included the 46-peso federal fee to go to the island, which is a protected site.) The company provided snorkeling equipment, including wet suits, for those who wanted it.

My wife and I were more interested in photographing the sights and I was afraid we’d end up on some beach bored while the others snorkeled. Instead, we were not on some boring beach, but with a colony of sea lions. Add to that the various birds and fish and we had so much to photograph that I was actually sorry to leave. I understood why Jacques Cousteau called the Sea of Cortez “the world’s aquarium.” Those who snorkeled reported that some sea lions gently nipped them—one showed us sea lion teeth marks on her flippers.

The tour included lunch at another beach on the island and a close look at other parts of the island, which is an unending and ever-changing cornucopia of rock formations on which I trained my cameras. We didn’t get to see as much as advertised because when we were picked up, our pilot, who had come in from another location, reported having seen a whale in the Bay of La Paz and so we diverted on our way to the island in the hope of seeing it. Unfortunately, no whales surfaced.

As for the beaches in the Bay of La Paz, we settled on one in a cove that did not have any food or bar services. It was too shallow for swimming, but great for wading and even better for photography. Pelicans and rock formations were the subjects of our photography on beach day.

We rented a car for $612 (half of which was insurance) and calculated that it paid for itself. For example, had we paid for the Isla Espiritu Santo tour from our hotel, it would have been $100 per person. We drove to the launch site and paid $40 each plus a $15 tip. A beach tour was advertised at $35 a person; we did it ourselves at our leisure and had the option to get out and explore each site. A tour to Todos Santos, a nearby art community on the Pacific Ocean, was $85 each; we drove ourselves. We did pay $25 a person for the city tour, which was extremely informative and took us to places we would have never gone in our car. The driving tips alone were worth paying for.

Whether or not La Paz can sustain the growth implied in the construction we saw remains to be seen. Water is a problem and we purchased a 5-gallon bottle for drinking. The sewer system, according to a sign in one store, is so old that it stops up easily, although we received no such warning at our timeshare and had no problems.

We’d like to go back with our grandchildren and hope we can do that before things change too much.

Think, Sarah, Think

2010-02-08T09:30:00.002-07:00

Before watching the science fiction movie District 9 on On Demand the other night, we first watched Sarah Palin’s speech at the Tea Party convention in Nashville. Nothing she said changed my mind about her.

My wife and I were John McCain supporters in the Republican primary, but questioned our decision when he picked Palin as his running mate and we realized that McCain had lost his groove. And as the campaign continued and Palin spoke out more and more, we decided McPalin wasn’t for us.

You can pick your favorite Palin statements, from her claim to having foreign policy experience because she could see Russia from her front porch to her inability to answer a softball question about what periodicals she read. (I had to answer that question for a three-officer review panel when as an enlisted man in the Navy I was applying for a college program, so I could never understand why it flummoxed Palin, who as a candidate for vice president was in a pay grade much higher than mine.)

The most revealing part of Palin’s Nashville performance came not during her speech, but in an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, whose Fox News Sunday I watch faithfully, even during football season. Frankly, I had to watch it twice and then read about before I understood what she was really saying.

Turns out, Palin is advocating a war with Iran. When I realized what she was saying, I was stunned. This is a politician who belongs to the party of the president who got us into a war over weapons of mass destruction that have yet to be uncovered, a president who never really went after Osama Bin Laden, but instead mired us in Afghanistan. And now she wants the United States in a third war!

Palin made my old hero Barry Goldwater sound like a pacifist.

Which part of a military stretched thin doesn’t she understand? Which part of an astronomical federal debt doesn’t she understand?

Palin also told Wallace that she’s getting daily e-mail briefings from people in Washington. Instead, she ought to start reading periodicals so she knows what’s really going on in the world.

And then she needs to think, not talk. The more she talks the deeper she digs herself into a hole.

On second thought, talk, Sarah, talk.

An Illustrated History of Tamaqua

2010-01-31T05:45:00.005-07:00

Gifford H. Albright and R Thomas Berner are pleased to announce the publication of An Illustrated History of Tamaqua. The 120-page book contains photos and short historical essays about the photos. Albright is a native Tamaquan and Berner grew up there. Albright graduated from Tamaqua High in 1948 and Berner in 1961.

The following comes from the book:

From the Authors

This endeavor has enabled us to reminisce and we hope it will do the same for you. As we were compiling this, we remembered places we had played as children, train rides we had taken to faraway cities, politicians who had come to town on trains to campaign, schools we had attended that no longer exist.

We have benefitted from the work of others and while we list our sources at the end, we happily acknowledge the work of Paul Scherer, whose Musings of a Chronicler were compiled on a CD—with old photographs—by Bob Betz. A third person whose work made our job easy was David Bensinger, who compiled old postcards of Tamaqua, some of which appear here.

We especially salute Bob Betz for taking the time to look at our final manuscript. And we thank Micah Gursky for providing a copy of an old map that we tweaked in Photoshop to create the cover.

We note a certain irony in this compilation. We never set foot in Tamaqua to do any research, but were able to find our sources either online or, in the case of the Scherer collection, on a CD purchased many years ago by one of us. We communicated via e-mail.

We need to emphasize that we are not historians and have not sought out primary sources to confirm what we learned from secondary sources. We also want to emphasize that this in no way is a definitive history. If we did not have a particular image, we did not write an essay. We debated how far afield to go in each essay and decided that for the most part, each essay would focus on the image and that we would seldom update to provide current information. Sometimes we used an image to represent something larger. The Tamaqua Unions allowed us to mention modern championship seasons.

In our selection of photos, we aimed to be representative. We had three times as many photos as we used but wanted to keep the book to a reasonable length and price. In order to hold down the price, the authors are forgoing royalties.

Would Jesus Play Football?

2010-01-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, I used to get a kick whenever a player from the opposing team would step to the foul line, bless himself—and miss. While I was borderline irreligious by then, I suspect my glee came in part from having been raised in an evangelical environment that was decidedly anti-Catholic. My church found a way to campaign against JFK without losing its tax-free status.

Unlike Michael Vick, who claims that abusing dogs was a way of life when he was a child and so he never gave it a second thought when he became an adult, I have reflected on my past and hope that after more than six decades I am an accepting person, that your religion or race or gender doesn’t matter to me. Well, race and gender.

I remain conflicted about religion. I’ve read about the dark side of so many “devout” people that my cynicism has grown exponentially. I still can’t believe that given all the highly religious people in Congress that we would need a code of ethics. I learned my ethics in Sunday school and still practice them.

The latest mixed message occurred recently in a professional football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Miami Dolphins. In the second half of the game, a Pittsburgh player, in tackling a Miami player, knocked him unconscious. It was immediately evident that something was wrong. The victim wasn’t moving. That’s never good.

Within minutes, if not seconds, a group of Steelers joined in prayer on the field. I understood.

But then I reflected on the situation and it made me wonder.

Would Jesus play football?

Here we have a very violent game in which the object is to stop the opposing team by knocking down the person with the ball—and not gently. (Remember Darryl Stingley?) And so these men participate in this violent game, and when someone is hurt, they pray.

There’s a big contradiction there. The story of Jesus is not one of violence. He was not competitive in any sense of the word. I don’t think he’d even play a friendly game of touch football with the apostles.

Thus, I question the faith of those who would pound their fellow man into unconsciousness—and then pray for his recovery. Doesn’t compute.

Restructure Legislature for Efficacy

2010-01-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

(Published in the Santa Fe New Mexican on Jan. 3, 2010.)

Gov. Richardson has made a eminently sensible proposal—a statewide ban on the use of hand-held cell phones while driving. He said he’ll introduce a bill when the Legislature convenes in January.

Why wait?

Well, as everyone knows, New Mexico government is structured in such a way that very little gets done except when the Legislature meets (and some might say very little gets done then anyway). And so everything is crammed into a 30-day or a 60-day session—or isn’t acted on at all.

I’d like to suggest that we hold a constitutional convention and bring New Mexico’s governing structure into the 21st century.

What changes would I propose?

We might have a fulltime legislature, meeting or on call from the day after Labor Day until the day before Memorial Day. That way we don’t have to wait for the annual session to have problems addressed (and solved—or not).

If for some reason, the Legislature must convene beyond Memorial Day, the legislators work for free. There’s no such thing as overtime pay, not even per diem. Get the people’s work done in nine months and go home.

I’d also suggest that the new legislature be unicameral like Nebraska, which has about 200,000 fewer residents than New Mexico and does just fine with a one-house legislature and 49 senators (compared to 112 legislators for New Mexico). Checks and balances will occur naturally, even within a one-party structure. (Think Democrats and health care reform.)

And one more thing: term limits. Eight years is enough. It works at the county level; why can’t it work at the state level?

(R Thomas Berner, a former town councilman in another state, now lives in Santa Fe.)

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T06:20:00.002-07:00

I finally created something on my graphic tablet worth sharing.

How A Mortal Sin Was Erased

2009-12-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Even though we were in the same room as each other, I never met C.D.B. Bryan. He was at Penn State with his mother, Katharine, the widow of John O’Hara, to dedicate the opening of the O’Hara study early in 1975, an event I covered for the Centre Daily Times. After all, O’Hara and I went way back, although I had never met him either, hadn’t even been in the same room with him.

Years later, after Bryan had published Friendly Fire, I caught up with him via the telephone and tried to lure him to Penn State. I was, at the time, in charge of getting judges for the Katey Lehman Writing Contest and I thought Bryan would make a good judge. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it work but it was then that I learned that he had been at the dedication of the O’Hara study.

I used the phone call to apologize for a mistake I had made with his name. Perhaps to some it would be a venial sin, but in the newsroom getting someone’s name wrong is a mortal sin and I had carried the burden of this sin long enough.

I confessed that I had cited him in a essay or a book somewhere (I can’t find it today) and referred to him as O’Bryan. Maybe it was the O’Hara connection that made me do it.

He laughed. He told me that his sister had gotten him personalized pencils as a gift and they bore the name C.D.B. O’BRYAN. She never noticed the error and so my mortal sin was instantly reduced to a venial sin, my penance done for confessing, erased from the Book of Sins.

I took notice of Bryan with the publication of Friendly Fire, a book about the skepticism of an Iowa mother after the death of her son in Vietnam. Friendly fire comes from your friends, not your enemy, and the soldier’s mother could not grasp how her son had died. She suspected foul play.

What held my attention was the way Bryan told the story. A mystery, the book is written in the conventional third person for the first two-thirds of the pages, as we follow the parents—and primarily the mother—dealing with the mystery of their son’s death and how the mother evolves into an anti-war advocate.

And then Bryan shifts—unwillingly, he says—to the first person because he has to tell us what he learned from his investigation of the soldier’s death. The shift is jarring, but as you read on, it works. The story is no longer about the soldier’s death, but what Bryan learned in his investigation. The shift makes sense.

Bryan wrote several books in his lifetime, but the author of his obituary in the New York Times last week said his career was distinguished by Friendly Fire. I would agree. I still have the book and would urge anyone interested in good nonfiction to read it and study Bryan’s methods. They’re still good today.

Voltage Flows

2009-12-04T09:32:00.001-07:00

The most important thing I learned in the Navy’s radio school was not Morse Code. I could barely copy 20 words a minute when I graduated from radio school and was pretty much useless when I got to the fleet. It was a good thing most of what we did was done on a teletype machine. I can type.

No, the most important thing I learned was when something electrical didn’t work first make sure it’s plugged in. You laugh, I’m sure, but I’ve seen it time and again with others who didn’t do that simple step first and wasted a lot of time trying to make something work that wasn’t broken.

One of my radio school classmates was a guy named Fisher. I think he came from Buffalo. He was a really intelligent person and grasped most of what we were taught quite quickly. But there was one lesson that eluded him: the difference between current and voltage.

Current was easy to grasp. That’s what flows through electrical wires (when they’re plugged in). Fisher could not grasp voltage. The rest of us did because we took orders unquestionably. But Fisher, as I said, was intelligent and he needed a better understanding. In his mind, voltage flowed with current.

Turns out, voltage is a rather complex thing to explain, as I learned in doing research for this essay. But I remember what our instructor in radio school told Fisher: Voltage is a measurement taken at a certain point in the wire. It doesn’t flow. It can be found anywhere along a wire, but it doesn’t flow. It’s there and there and there, but it didn’t flow there.

Fisher could not understand that, and when we graduated, we marched to our ceremonies with our homemade class banner that proclaimed: THE FISH KNOWS THAT VOLTAGE FLOWS.

The same problem arises with the people on television who claim to be meteorologists. They don’t understand that temperature is a measurement of the air. It’s just like voltage. It’s there and there and there. It goes up and down.

But what temperature does not do is get colder or hotter. The air does, but the temperature is unfeeling. It just measures how hot or how cold the air is and leaves the rest to us. We’re the ones who decide if it’s hot or cold.

That’s why I cringe when I hear TV weather people say that temperatures will be warm or cold. Every time I hear it, it reminds me of Fisher and the flawed logic of flowing voltage.

A Triple F for AAA

2009-11-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

Back in July friends of ours in Missouri invited us to join them at a timeshare in La Paz, Mexico, in January. We were glad to say yes immediately. Who wouldn’t want to spend a week near the tip of the Baja Peninsula in January?

We all purchased tickets in August via AAA’s Web site, seeing that prices were rising and knowing that the closer we got to January, not only would prices be high, but tickets might be hard to get.

Sometime in October the situation changed and we started getting changes in our schedule. That would have been fine, except the changes were at odds with the rest of the schedule. For example, Paulette and I were flying into Guadalajara to catch a plane to La Paz, but the only flight to La Paz would have already left. The four us were also leaving La Paz for Guadalajara on a flight that would make us late for our return flight to Dallas.

At first we dealt with Travelocity and we managed to take care of the Guadalajara conflict by going through Mexico City. No problem. But trying to straighten out the conflict on our return flight soaked up our cell minutes but got us nowhere.

It was then that I turned to AAA. Because I used AAA to book flights in the past, I just happened to have a phone number you won’t find on the AAA Web site. It wasn’t the same person, but the person who answered did direct me to the folks who handled international travel for AAA.

My friend called and his flight was changed so the conflict was removed. The travel agent then called me to confirm that I wanted the change also. I said yes but when I never received confirmation, I checked American Airlines for my itinerary and discovered that the flight had not been changed. I called AAA’s international travel number, explained the situation, listened as the person spoke to someone at the airlines in Spanish, was promised a return call and confirmation that the change would occur.

Never happened.

I talked to my AAA contact, who, while sympathetic, could not help me despite the fact that I’m up to date on my dues. So I called the other number for a third time, explained to yet another agent what happened. It took at least 30 minutes, most of them on hold, before the agent said that the airline had to “protect” me because of the conflict or I could get a full refund. The protection made me stay overnight in Guadalajara (no offer of a hotel) and fly out the next day.

I took the full refund.

Fortunately, I was able to book the trip through another Web site and it’s actually a better route than the original. I think I’ll forget AAA in the future.

Trickle-Down Cuts

2009-11-02T07:51:00.001-07:00

Early the other morning, my wife said she had seen breaking news about the CIA giving money to someone in Afghanistan and she was trying to get the story by watching CNN.

I had just freed my local newspaper and The New York Times from their plastic wraps, putting the local newspaper on the kitchen counter to be read with my next cup of coffee and the Times on the coffee table in front of the sofa to be read later in the day during happy hours. I had already skimmed the Times online, but prefer to read hard copy and don’t even give it glance when I unwrap it in the morning.

“The story’s right there,” I said, pointing to the Times. I knew that much from my morning online skim. “It’s probably the lead story,” I said. I walked over to the coffee table, picked it up and handed it to her.

It was the lead the story, complete with a four-column photograph and a two-column headline, indications of the high value Times editors placed on the story: “Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.”

This was not the first time I’ve pointed out to my wife that many of the in-depth stories she hears about on TV appear first in The New York Times. And that’s why cutbacks in the newsroom at the Times—and the most recent announcement that 100 more will occur—is bad news not just for the Times, but for all of journalism.

The story had three bylines on it and a fourth reporter was credited as a contributor at the end. It was a massive reporting effort both in Washington and Afghanistan. How many newspapers or cable news channels are going to put four reporters on an in-depth two-country story?
But how many newspapers and news channels picked up on the Times’ story and used it in some fashion, including as a topic for the talk shows?

And there’s where the loss of 100 positions in the Times’ newsroom really means 100 fewer positions in newsrooms around the country. It means less coverage for everyone.

So while I am sure there are those who are happy to see the Times in reduced circumstances, they too will suffer in the long run. Democracy is fueled by information and a free and open debate. Journalists, through their work, help provide the fuel.

Tamaqua Then and Now

2009-09-25T06:55:00.002-06:00

This book is a collection of photographs/postcards—then and now—of the town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. I graduated from Tamaqua Area Joint Senior High School in 1961, worked for two years at the Evening Courier, a newspaper that no longer exists, then joined the U.S. Navy. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, I was able to go to Penn State and I never really returned to Tamaqua except for visits to family.

So this book is a long overdue return visit. I collected old photographs and postcards of Tamaqua from many sources and then walked around town on two days in July 2009 taking new photographs of old sites. I did not use anything other than my eyes to attempt to match the new with the old. For the most part, I shot with a 10:20 lens because I believed that only a wide-angle lens would recapture the past. The camera actually captured much more than the originals, so I then cropped to more or less match.

This book is a work in progress and a labor of love. Although there is some history attached to some of the photographs, for the most part it’s the comparative scenes that I was most interested in. After all, I’m not a historian and I don’t have the resources to track down the history of each building. But I do have a camera.

I wasn’t able to photograph every site to match every postcard or photograph that I have. I just plain forgot to shoot the Majestic Hotel, and a truck that was parked in front of Odd Fellows’ Cemetery for days on end made me skip that scene. Heavy foliage kept me from shooting some scenes from the road to New England Valley and lack of time or foul weather kept me from getting some other photographs.

Given that some day I hope to go back and also my hope that other old photographs and postcards will surface, I’d like to think of this book as a first edition or first in a series. I love Tamaqua—it really was an important part of my life—and I’d like to help contribute to remembering it in my way.

I’d like to suggest that someone organize a major one-year photoshoot in Tamaqua to record what the town is like now so a century hence residents will have photos for comparison. When I think of all of the buildings that have disappeared in my lifetime (including the Courier!), I realize how important it is to document the town now for the day when it will be the town then.

R Thomas Berner

Farewell, My Lucy

2009-09-22T07:55:00.004-06:00

A couple of years ago we replaced our noisy garage door with one that was so silent, Paulette and I never knew when one another had come home. On the other hand, Lucy would usually jump up from wherever she was and mosey down the hall to the laundry room and await the person or persons who had just driven into the garage.

We knew, though, she wouldn't be there the night we returned from a photo trip to White Sands. We knew because we knew our dog sitter had taken her to our vet after finding her lying on the floor and unable to stand that afternoon. We cut short our trip, checked out of our hotel, and returned to Santa Fe on a four-hour trip made mostly in silence. For part of the trip a rainbow seemed to track with us, but I think we both knew better. We just didn't say anything.

***

We rescued Lucy when she was two years old. Our previous golden retriever, Bailey, had died a couple of months earlier and our vet had alerted us that someone had an adult golden who needed a home. We both agreed we'd check out the dog and decide within a week. No quick decisions.

Lucy came home with us the same day we met her.

My previous goldens had adapted quickly to their surroundings. Show them the property line and they would, for the most part, never cross it. Lucy was a block away within seconds, chasing a neighbor's cat.

It was the first of many times we realized that she had a mind of her own and that she loved to run as far away from us as she could. No command would bring her back. We learned that the best way to have her return to us when we took her for a run in a nearby Penn State cornfield was to do it with her boyfriend, Ed, a golden one year younger. When Ed, who obeyed all commands, would return to his master, Lucy usually followed. Usually.

***

She did show some signs of adaptability when we moved to Santa Fe. Unlike us, she quickly figured out that when not moving around, you found shade. If she wanted to rest while on an early morning walk, she plopped down in the shade. Sometimes that meant I had to stand in the sun waiting until she was ready to move on.

We had hoped that she would stay close to home but when we took her to a nearby field and let her run, she ran, just as she had in Pennsylvania. Older, but no wiser. Getting her to return was tricky and so we seldom took her on runs, but did walk her every day, usually for four miles.

Around the age of 10, she wasn't as big on long walks and so I would walk her for about two miles and then go back out on my own. Closer to 12, she didn't always want to walk two miles and that was fine. I let her decide.

We usually entered the trail system near our house and at the first right turn, if she wanted to go home, she'd take the turn. but if she didn't, she'd move as far to the left as she could and walk past the right turn looking straight ahead. I think she was afraid that if I saw her look right, I'd take her that way against her will.

Lucy figured in three books I wrote. In the first, The Cottontails and the Jackrabbits, a children's book, a golden retriever "steals" a baby jackrabbit. All ends well, of course, because golden retrievers retrieve, not hurt. In fact, for this book I need an illustration of a golden running through a field of wild flowers. We took Lucy to the nearby field and just to make sure she'd come back to us, we took a supply of dog biscuits, which in our house are called bones.

Unleashed, she did not move. We told her to run. She did not move. Finally, I threw a bone and she went after it and came right back. So we were now in reverse of the past. Rather than using a bone to lure her back, we used it to get her to run away. (See photo above)

In The Hunt for Domingo Roybal, Lucy's eye problems became problems for one of the minor characters who spent a lot of money on clothing and was always short of cash. Then there was The Bump on Lucy's Nose, a children's book based on another medical problem Lucy came through successfully.

***

A couple of nights before we left on our photo trip, we had a really violent storm. Lucy got in bed with us, something she did during storms only when she got older. The next day we had several errands to run and for some reason I invited Lucy to join us. She had a hard time jumping into the car, but I suggested that it was because she was so excited she didn't position herself correctly before leaping. Still, the three of us had a grand time together running errands.

The next day we left her in the care of her beloved dog sitter and never saw her again.

We will scatter her ashes among the wild flowers in the field where she liked to run when we let her.

A Boswell Moment

2009-09-05T06:53:00.005-06:00

(In 2002, Bill Welch, who died on Sept. 4, was honored by Penn State as a Renaissance Scholar. He asked me, among others, to make remarks. My remarks follow.)

Had I known I was going to get my three minutes of fame as Bill Welch’s Boswell—that’s Boswell the biographer, not Boswell the sportswriter—I would have taken notes. Much of what I have to say has been dragged from my aging memory. It has been contextualized, re-contextualized, romanticized—and sanitized.

By sanitized, I mean I won’t say anything that wouldn’t be acceptable in mixed company—mixed company being defined as journalists and non-journalists.

I used to think that Bill was a trivia expert because he could produce information about anything, anywhere, anytime. Now I realize that the man I met more than 30 years ago was a Renaissance scholar. I am here to pay tribute to the scholar.

As a scholar, Bill had a rocky start. When he attended Penn State, he was one of the original HUB Rats. He was so good at it that President Walker red-shirted him—and that’s the real reason it took Bill five years to graduate.

As a scholar, he takes his time. Don’t lend him a book. It took him 20 years to read and return Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And I still don’t think he read it, but he did say it helped him fall asleep at night.

Bill is very good at coming up with a light-hearted one-line comment on just about any situation. Shortly after I started working with him at the Centre Daily Times, I noticed a story that referred to him as a native of State College. I pointed out that to be a native of some place, you had to have been born there—and he had been born in Philadelphia. After all, the word “native” is derived from “nativity.”

Without pause, he replied: “True, but I was conceived here.”

Bill may have struck the first blow for fetal rights—and we didn’t know it at the time.

Bill is an original. No cliché has ever passed through his lips or his typewriter. Jerry Weinstein, our editor at the CDT, said that Bill was his best writer—but he didn’t write enough. When I told Bill what Jerry said, Bill said he didn’t write more because he found writing difficult. And while that may sound self-deprecating, it really was his honest response, not his usual one-line quip.

If brevity is, as Polonius said, the soul of wit, then, in Bill’s case, it is also the seed of wisdom. I remember a time when he needed to rein in an aggressive city editor. Trying to find a way to make the person understand good people skills, he said: Your approach is Napoleonic while mine is Socratic.

Consider the sub-text and allusion in that sentence. In one sentence, he was able to size up a situation and give it perspective.

But enough of Bill’s quick wit. The most important thing about Bill Welch is not his humor or his intellect, but his selfless character.

Bill can tell a story about himself and not be the center of the story. It can be an adventure or a travelogue and you feel as though you’re with him. His stories entertain, enlighten and inform.

I have seldom seen Bill angry. The only two times I ever saw him get short with someone involved situations in which the other person was racially insensitive. The blood rose immediately and Bill pounced. No time for Socrates.

I have known longer than many about his medical problems and yet I have never heard him complain.

Even though, in his words, he took life on a respirator to the outer limits and he also needed to go through extensive rehabilitation, he never complained.

Even when he was on dialysis, he never complained.

Even when Borough Council is acting up, he never complains.

Well, a little bit.

He reminds me of Job. Great patience. Great role model. The ability to make us all feel good about ourselves and each other. Not only a Renaissance scholar, but a Renaissance man.

Congratulations to a very deserving person.

Thank you.

Why Republicans Are Fighting an Uphill Battle in New Mexico

2009-08-20T05:50:00.000-06:00

Mr. Dooley dropped by my office the other day to provide some insight on the current state of political affairs in New Mexico. I wasn’t taking notes so this is from memory and it’s not in his Irish brogue. I can’t write like he talks. I can’t even talk like he talks.
Dooley: So, Berner, you’re looking forward to the next round of elections in The Land of Enchantment?
Berner: Should be interesting. No incumbent for governor. Republicans could win.
D: Not a chance.
B: Why not?
D: When you hear Republicans talk, what do they say?
B: Here, they’re talking about how corrupt the state is.
D: What else?
B: How fiscally conservative they are.
D: Right. To cut to the chase, they say: Less government, lower taxes. Right?
B: Sure. All Republicans say that.
D: Let’s discuss issues. Let’s start with DWI.
B: That’s a big issue in New Mexico. The party that can solve that can reign forever.
D: So here’s the Republican response: Less government, lower taxes.
B: What’s wrong with that?
D: How does that solve the DWI problem?
B: Beats me.
D: What’s another issue?
B: I have to admit that public education is in a sorry state. Even I am shocked at the political meddling that’s going on in higher education.
D: So here’s the Republican response: Less government, lower taxes.
(I didn’t say anything and Mr. Dooley kept talking.)
Voters are not terribly bright and in New Mexico I sense they’ll just vote for the Democrats. But think about it. The Democrats have been in power a long time. DWI became a problem on their watch. Low achievement in the public schools—on the their watch. But the voters don’t see that and the Republicans don’t get it. Look, if you want less government and lower taxes, it means you’re not going to work at solving the DWI problem and the low academic achievement in the public schools. And all the other problems that people expect government to solve.
(I just listened.)
So the Democrats win every time. Only losers are the people. But, hey, they love their lower taxes.
On that note, Mr. Dooley left New Mexico for Pennsylvania.

Chianti From a Tuscan Villa

2009-08-11T14:22:00.007-06:00

Paulette and I are very happy to see our collaborative effort, Chianti From a Tuscan Villa, in print.

We spent seven days on a modest group tour of the Chianti region of Tuscany, staying in a Tuscan villa and going on day trips around the area, to Castellina, Florence, Lucca, San Gimignano, Siena, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, and Volterra.

On those day trips, we both photographed extensively with the idea of creating this book, a combination of Tom’s photographs and Paulette’s paintings, to create our interpretation of the region that gave birth to the Renaissance and Chianti wine.

And although we visited places not on the tour, such as the Beaded Lily Glass Works in Florence, our plans for other sites did not always pan out. Thomas wanted to see the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the English Cemetery in Florence, but the cemetery was closed for renovation work. He did manage to get some photos from a distance. (If you want to see Browning’s tomb, watch the movie Tea with Mussolini. The film opens at her tomb. The film also shows frescoes of Santa Fina in San Gimignano’s Collegiata. )

Alas, museums and churches, for the most part, did not allow photography, and if they did, it had to be without flash (no problem) and tripod (which made getting good photographs in low light a challenge). One church, Santa Lucia al Borghetto in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa (the town where we stayed), allowed photography and the use of a tripod, one of the few times indoor photographs could be taken at a slow speed.

The typeface for the book title and running heads is Medici™ Script Std Regular from Adobe, appropriate for a book of photographs and paintings about the land of the Medici family.

If you have any questions, contact journprof@comcast.net.

The old New Mexico State Penitentiary

2009-08-06T15:48:00.005-06:00

On July 25, 2009, as part of PhotoArts Santa Fe, I went on a field trip to the old New Mexico State Penitentiary, infamous for a riot in 1980 in which 33 inmates were murdered by other inmates. About 10 photographers spent three hours shooting inside and outside the prison. Most of the interior shots had to be done on a tripod, unless you wanted to use flash, which no one did.

I took only my Nikon D40 with a Sigma 10:20 lens. I figured that being inside a dark prison, I wouldn’t have much use for my D80 with its 18:200 lens–and I was right. Most of the spaces were not very big, so the wide angle worked perfectly.

We started in the gas chamber, but I have not organized this book according to the way we moved through the prison. In fact, once we were shown the gas chamber, we were free to roam about the unit in which the murderous riot took place. We saw where inmates’ heads were chopped off and where one inmate’s body was incinerated.

I didn’t take any photos there, but I did shoot the gas chamber. It was used only once--in 1960--so it didn’t quite carry the same burden that the cellblock of death did.

Our guide said that the prison was closed in 1999 and everyone moved to a new facility nearby. As the photos show, no effort was made to clean up. Today part of the prison is used as a movie set.

The Hosie

2009-07-29T08:50:00.002-06:00

One of the anchors in my younger days, at a time when anchors were very important (and had nothing to do with the Navy, which would come along a little later in my life), was the American Hose Company No. 1 of Tamaqua. At the time, it was one of four companies in town, joined by the Citizens, East End and South Ward. All members were volunteers.

You had to be 18 to join any of the companies, and one great benefit was that you could drink even though the legal age was 21. Because the fire companies were all clubs and admission was by membership only, there was little fear of a surprise raid by liquor control board agents.

However, the real anchor was not the alcohol, but the camaraderie. And in some cases, surrogate fathers for a fatherless male.

Volunteers learned to work with others of all ages, not only in training to fight fires but in cleaning up after. I still remember one major lesson after all these years: Always be ready for the next fire. When we returned from a fire, we’d pull all of the hoses off our trucks and replace them with dry ones, putting the wet ones on the hose rack. Today, when I return from a photo shoot, I immediately download my photos to my computer and ensure that my camera batteries are charged: Always be ready for the next shoot.

I feel a great loyalty to the Hosie and was thrilled when I was asked to help write the history of the company for its 100th anniversary celebration in 1978. By that time I was a graduate student at Penn State, married with children. We made weekend trips to Tamaqua in part to see Grandma but also for me to conduct research on my master’s thesis, about The Evening Courier, where I had my first full-time newspaper job after graduating from high school in 1961. (See One Man’s Newspaper History.)

Imagine my delight in the next century when, while doing research for a book about Tamaqua, I came across an old photo of members of the Hosie posed with their three trucks (circa 1930). Because my book focuses on doing comparative photos—then and now—the old Hosie photo was perfect.

Of course, I now know no one at the Hosie, having let my membership lapse in the early 1970s. But I was able to locate a retired member who had served the community as fire chief, and he set up a photo opportunity for me.

And it was revealing. The trucks are no longer red, but blue. The Hosie houses, but does not own, the town’s only aerial truck, as it did when I was a member. The members could not afford to raise the money to buy an aerial truck, so the borough council bought one. It doesn’t say AMERICAN HOSE CO. NO 1 on its doors, but TAMAQUA FIRE DEPARTMENT. Each member now has his own gear with his name on the back, wrapped low around big rubber boots so when the alarm sounds, each can jump into the boots and pull up his trousers and jump onto the truck. No more trying to put on gear while hanging onto a truck bellowing through town to a fire.

Before we could set up the equipment for the photo shoot, an alarm came in for a propane spill at Turkey Hill (a convenience store) and the men were off. I almost—almost—jumped on the truck, but instead photographed the trucks as they pulled out.
When the trucks returned to the Hosie, the captain looked at the old photograph I was trying to imitate and, on his command, drivers moved the trucks into position. Because the aerial wasn’t the Hosie’s, it was not included in the updated photo.

After the shoot, my contact showed me around. In the bar we looked at old photos of what we called the marching club. I recognized many of the people in the 1960 photo. Most, if not all, are gone. I had a hard time identifying anyone in the 1978 photo.

When I got back to Santa Fe and compared then and now photos, I realized that firefighting equipment had gotten so big, the view down the street was obscured.

But the memories lingered, anchored in time.

And Now We Are One

2009-07-14T10:24:00.000-06:00

You may recall my short essay about my two teenage buddies, Bud Kistler and Bill Klingaman, and how Bud convinced me there was such a thing as a woodle bird [http://rtberner.blogspot.com/2009/04/woodle-bird.html]. Alas, when we went our separate ways, I never saw Bud again, but Bill and I did stay in touch and when Paulette and I were in our last months in State College, Bill and his wife, Libby, visited us.

Bill and I have a long history. By some coincidence, we ended up in first grade together even though I did not live in the same ward as the school. We shared, first, second, and sixth through 12th grades. We graduated in 1961.

We also shared membership in the American Hose Company of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, otherwise known as The Hosie. (I count membership in the Hosie as one of the great experiences of my life, and I know that Bill and I spent many a night there playing pinochle and drinking beer and occasionally fighting fires.)

Bill was a very intelligent person. He inherited his father’s business savvy and his mother’s intellect. He never went to college and, except for military service, never left Tamaqua. He and his brothers took over the family business from his father and ran it successfully. They had two good role models in their parents.

He served on Tamaqua Borough Council and when he decided not to run again after a couple of terms in office, a newspaper story recounted the time he served as chair of the council’s street committee. As each committee chair reported information in great detail about his domain, it got to Bill.

“Street committee.”

“The streets are still there,” Bill replied. End of report.

It was always difficult trying to extract something from Bill. It wasn’t because he didn’t know. Rather, he chose not to fill a room with rhetoric. He knew when to speak and when to remain silent, a lesson for all of us.

I remember when Bill was courting Libby. He could be subtle—and, we already know, laconic. I recall that he would show up at the Hosie and ask me if I wanted to go to some bar down country. Turns out, Libby had a singing gig there and that was the real reason he wanted to go. But he didn’t quite lay it out so clearly when he was asking me. Just, do you want to go to …? (I went. Only after we arrived did I put two and two together.)

About 18 months ago I learned that Bill had cancer, halted in one organ but showing up in another. Time was short, I was told. When we visited Pennsylvania in 2008, Bill and I tried to meet, but he was at his favorite vacation spot in the Poconos and I was locked into a schedule that did not permit me to get there. At least, though, he seemed to be beating the odds.

This week we’re headed for the Region and I tipped Bill and Libby that I was coming and would drop by to see them. I gave them my cell phone number.

One of Bill’s sons used it to call me with the news that Bill’s days were numbered.

He died at home on Monday, July 13. He was 66.

I did get to Bud’s funeral and I will be at Bill’s on Friday, filled with the memories of a great lifelong friend.

Dare To Be a Daniel

2009-07-10T14:19:00.000-06:00

(I gave this talk to a dinner for students at Tamaqua High School, my alma mater, on May 18, 1992. The students were being honored for excellence.)
…
I know that you are all achievers and you have a good idea of how to achieve. I wonder, though, if I might be presumptuous enough to provide some additional thoughts on how to reach the next level of achievement. These thoughts have guided me throughout my life—in fact, I learned them in Tamaqua—and since they’ve helped me, perhaps they will help you.

• Don’t always stick with what’s comfortable. If I may relate to my classroom at Penn State, let me tell you that contrary to what you may believe, newspapers don’t have much of an impact on how people think. The research shows that people tend to read what they agree with and to avoid reading they don’t agree with.

I urge you to read books, essays and articles that you don’t agree with. Be receptive to new ideas. I didn’t say you had to change your mind; I just want to ensure that you have enough to go on when you make a decision. And you can only do that if you already read ideas you agree with.

• Don’t give up when you have a new idea to give to the world. A new idea is first a lone voice in the wilderness. As others start to adopt the idea, you will hear an echo. Finally, a choir. It takes a long time to get to the choir stage, but when you reach that stage, everybody’s on board—and it’s a wonderful feeling. Some people let life happen; other people make life happen. Always be someone who makes life happen.

• Don’t be trendy. Do things because you want to, not because everyone else is doing them. I realize that you’re under a great deal of peer pressure at this point in your life. Everybody wants to be like everybody else. Conformity is in. I would urge all of you to celebrate the differences; that’s what makes us individuals—and better people.

• Keep an open mind when meeting someone from another culture. I realize that when I use the phrase “another culture” around young people, they think I’m talking about their parents. But I’m talking about the wide diversity in our country, even just in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

It has been my great honor to have served my country in the U.S. Navy and to have met people from many countries. Morocco. Italy. France. Spain. Mississippi. I learned not to judge people by the color of their skin. I learned that gray is the only color that matters—as in the gray matter between one’s ears—the brain. And that in matters of the mind, the color of a person’s skin—for that matter, someone’s gender—doesn’t matter. The stereotypes are wrong.

So let me emphasize:

Don’t judge a book by its cover or a person by the color of her skin. Look inside, and I am confident you will meet many fine people.

Finally, let me talk about my mother and Daniel.

My mother raised me mostly on Aesop’s Fables and the Old Testament. Every story, no matter the length, had a one-sentence moral, which my mother subsequently reminded me of when I was straying or which she would cite as a way of helping me find the right path in a sticky situation.

Of all the stories my mother told me, the one I liked the best, the one I think shaped me above all others, was the story of Daniel in the Old Testament.

Daniel, you may recall, put his faith ahead of his loyalty to secular matters, ran afoul of a decree by King Darius and was thrown into the lion’s den. But rather than being eaten alive, Daniel was protected by an angel and was alive when Darius came to check on him the following morning. Darius spared Daniel and punished his detractors.

When my mother would finish telling me the story of Daniel, she would turn to me and say, “And what is the moral of the story?”

In the beginning, I was slow to answer and she would firmly tell me: “Dare to be a Daniel, Son; dare to be a Daniel.”

For many years to come, whenever it appeared I was running with the crowd instead of standing on my own, my mother would say to me, “Dare to be a Daniel, Son; dare to be a Daniel.” My mothers one-sentence moral from Daniel in the lion’s den will be forever with me. It is something I have passed on to my daughters and I hope they pass it on to their children.

And that, ultimately, is the message that I want to leave with you.

Go forth in life.

Do good.

And dare to be a Daniel.

The world will be a better place because you did.

Thank you.

Photos from Tuscany

2009-06-27T08:08:00.002-06:00

Paulette and I spent a week in the Chianti Valley of Tuscany. (link removed by the author)

In the meantime, Paulette and I are working on our book, which will be the first in our Pixels and Bristles series. You may read more about that in a May post of the same name.

Book review: The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women

2009-06-11T10:50:00.000-06:00

The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women. The truth about Mexico’s bloody border legacy. Diana Washington Valdez. Peace at the Border Film Productions, Burbank, California. 390pp.

The day after I finished this book, I found an Associated Press story reporting that Mexican soldiers and federal agents had detained 29 local police officers in northern Mexico for alleged ties to drug traffickers. If I had not first read Diana Washington Valdez’s book, I would have been shocked. Having read it, I was surprised that only 29 officers had been arrested.

Valdez reports that from 1993 through 2005 nearly 500 females died violently in Juarez, Mexico. One was as young as 12. Another, 17, endured a severed right breast. Her left breast was mauled by human teeth. Similar conditions were reported for the many bodies recovered—and not all have been recovered. The victims had also been raped.

As a reporter for the El Paso (Texas) Times, Valdez worked on the story taking place just across the border, discovering along the way that some disappearances and deaths were never recorded. Police simply had no record, even though families had reported the victims missing. (Valdez lists the victims and the names of the missing in an appendix.)

Victims would disappear in daylight, sometimes with police patrols nearby, and authorities claimed to know nothing. They were not only know-nothings, but do-nothings. As Valdez reports, they were on the take. The drug cartel owned the city, the state, maybe even some levels of the federal government. Officials who could not be bribed were murdered. The AP story mentioned earlier said 10,750 people had been killed in Mexican drug violence between December 2006 and June 2, 2009, the day the story ran.

Many in the United States might think that what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico, but because this is drug related, it does spill over into the United States and not just at the border with Mexico. And while we may think of femicide as indigenous to Mexico, Valdez says it is practiced in many countries, sometimes as part of a gang initiation.

I would recommend this book with one qualification: It is not well organized. It’s overdone with multiple subheads on facing pages, an indication that subsections of the book are not as well developed as they might be. Valdez starts a chapter with a kidnapping but then veers away to write about a corrupt official or the FBI’s role in trying to solve the murders. Given the number of victims, I understand that organizing this book was a challenge.

That aside, the information is there in clear and unemotional prose. When you’re done reading—maybe even sooner—you’ll add the emotion.

2009-06-08T11:31:00.001-06:00

two-tailed swallowtail
delights me while I work—
alighting on jacob’s beard

Dance Fever

2009-05-31T11:30:00.000-06:00

If Sir Isaac Newton had ever seen me dance, he would have never written his first law. For that matter, if he had ever seen me in the gym, he might have had second thoughts. I am the antithesis of one-half of Newton’s first law.

I was thinking of Newton recently at my first dance session. My wife, Paulette, insisted I join her at a new age/oriental place one Friday morning, assuring me that I would get a good workout from an instructor who had just returned from Kyoto and who, Paulette said, has a black belt. When we started doing two-finger thrusts and shouting like a ninja, I knew it was not a black belt in dance.

Referring to the hour as “dance” is a misnomer. It was really a cardiovascular workout and the black belt assured everyone that they did not have to follow her lead and could do as they pleased. What an out! I was never in step with anyone and was grateful that my wife had agreed to our hanging out in the back line (near the exit, I might add) rather than up front where the nimble bodies (and they were young girls) gyrated, contorted and twisted in front of a mirror. If I tried to do what some of those well exercised girls were doing, my body would snap into a thousand pieces.

Shamefully, I must admit to being a clock watcher. Twenty minutes to quitting time. Uhmm. Nineteen minutes to quitting time. Uhmm. Nineteen minutes to quitting time. A watched clock does not change time very quickly. Uhmm.

The clock situation at the dance studio is not as bad as it is at the gym where Paulette and I work out in some fashion just about every day but the Sabbath, that being a day of rest for our trainer (and we are grateful). Unlike the dance studio, which has only one clock, the gym has two. That’s not a problem when you’re working on your own because you can start and quit when you want.

But when we’re working with the trainer, it’s another matter. She feels contractually obligated to give us an hour’s worth of training beginning at 8 a.m. after 5 minutes of warming up on our own, and no matter what position you’re in, you can see a clock. Treadmill. You can see a clock. Weights. You can see a clock. The mirrors don’t help.

Look, we tell her, it’s OK. We can do 45 minutes. Oh, no, says the trainer, who is also the owner. You paid for an hour; you’ll get an hour.

Talk about customer service!

Paulette and I have figured out ways to ease the sessions with the trainer. Twenty minutes into training (I check the clock), my nose is running, and off I go to the tissue box. The only one used to be near the main entrance. Now there’s one closer—in the training area. I need water, and off I go to the water tank at the entrance. (Yes, I’ve thought about ducking out once there.) Then there’s always the excuse that we have to use the facilities.

I think the trainer is on to us, but given our ages, looks the other way. We are grateful. After all, it’s not boot camp. Been there, done that.

When the black-belt dance instructor tells us that we don’t have to do every step she does, and that if anything hurts, don’t do it, we are grateful. After a lifetime of passing judgment on people’s performances, I’m only too glad to have entered a non-judgmental phase of my life.

But what does this have to do with Newton?

As you may recall (and I looked this up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, not Wikipedia), Newton postulated (and I paraphrase, which is always dangerous) that a body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion stays in motion. I’m here to tell you that he got the second part wrong. When I’m in motion, I can’t wait to rest.

Sorry, Isaac.

Pixels and Bristles™

2009-05-19T15:21:00.000-06:00

One of the things Paulette and I have been doing in our retirement is honing our creative skills. I’ve done a lot with graphic design and photography, and she’s taken many painting courses. I bought her a digital camera so she could take photos of things she wanted to paint. Sharing is a nice concept, but not when it comes to a camera. Having separate cameras has uncomplicated our creative lives.

But rather than bifurcating our work, it’s actually put us on a joint path and we’ve just begun something called Pixels and Bristles™, which is a trademark I applied for last week. Here’s what it entails:

We had decided last year to do a commercial photobook of a pending trip to Italy. Having been on such trips before, we know that people on the trip want a memento. But until I took some courses on creating photobooks beginning in 2006, I had no idea how to proceed. And now that Paulette has several painting courses to her credit, we have a plan.

The photobook idea has morphed into a book that will contain my photos and her paintings (which will be based on her photos). We’ve already done a trial run and you can check it out and download it for free at www.lulu.com. It’s titled Dry Run: Pixels and Bristles™.

You can see the cover illustration above. I learned in a Photoshop course this spring how to blend a scan of one of Paulette’s paintings of one of my photographs with one of my actual photographs.

We’d like to know what you think of the dry run and the idea.

The Woodle Bird

2009-04-30T18:57:00.000-06:00

(I wrote, but never published, this essay in January 1997.)

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I used to pal around with two guys I went to school with. Klingaman and Kistler.

We were all a little different and although we didn’t know it at the time all headed for separate lives. But in those days we hung out together, drank together, hiked together. Whatever.

Kistler, whom we called "Bud," was a very good outdoorsman. He knew his way around the woods and used to joke that he was going to abandon me in the woods one day to see if I could find my way out.

I remember one day we were in the woods and I heard a bird. It sounded like "woodle, woodle."

"What’s that?" I asked.

"A woodle bird," Bud said.

I heard it again. I didn’t know birds from birds, but for the rest of the day I could always distinguish the sound of a woodle bird.

We split. Bud joined the Navy, then I joined the Navy. He got out, married, and moved to away. Klinks stayed in the old town. I eventually ended up at Penn State.

Saw Klinks a few times. Never saw Bud. I wrote to him once when his mother died. She was a second mother to us. Used to make fabulous venison dinners and stuff us with food.

In October, Bud’s wife was in the laundry room when she heard a noise in the family room. She discovered Bud on the floor. She knelt over him.

He smiled. He sighed. And then he died.

The woodle bird was gone.

Rejected :-)

2009-04-23T07:43:00.001-06:00

As you know from an earlier post, A Budding Pixel Painter, I was hoping to take a painting class but instead of using paints, doing everything on my computer using my graphic tablet and Painter XI, a software program that mimics painting and comes with everything from acrylics to watercolors. Alas, my wife's painting instructor is as much a purist as my wife and turned me down. I shall continue my quest and let you know.

The Great Schism of 1970

2009-04-17T06:02:00.000-06:00

(Several years ago I was asked by the editor of the newspaper at Penn State if I had any football memories to share with his readers. I submitted the following, which appeared in an edited form—the best line having been removed. I reprise it [slightly edited for a wider audience] for my blog because I’m reading a biography of Chaucer.)

As football seasons go, the 1970 season was not one to remember. Mind you, the team under fifth-year head coach Joe Paterno finished 7-3, which is decent, but compared with coming off back-to-back 11-0 seasons and Orange Bowl victories, 7-3 was so-so. In 1970, the Nittany Lions finished 18^th in the Associated Press rankings and did not go to a bowl game. Jack Ham was named an All-American linebacker.

I looked up all of that information.

But, otherwise, I remember the fall of 1970 vividly.

It was my senior year at Penn State. My wife and I were new parents. I was a full-time student and working 4 p.m. to midnight as the city editor of a local morning newspaper, the Pennsylvania Mirror. I was an English major. I wrote short sentences and paragraphs by night and long ones by day.

With those hours, I didn’t have a lot of scheduling flexibility and thus ended up in an elective 400-level Chaucer course. Chaucer was fine, but the course met Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday (yes, we had Saturday classes then) at 8 a.m. Maybe it was 9:30, but when you work nights and don’t get to bed until 2 a.m., what’s the difference?

Not only that, we had to “learn” Middle English. You and I would write about April showers, but in Middle English, Chaucer opened “The Canterbury Tales” this way: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …” Fortunately for us, Chaucer’s poems were heavily annotated, which helped us learn that “his” was “its,” “shoures soote” were really “showers sweet” and “droghte” was “drought.”

You may have heard that the stories in “The Canterbury Tales” are rather ribald. Only if you speak the language. There’s nothing sensual about annotated Middle English.

The instructor was Bruce A. Rosenberg, young, vigorous, serious about the subject. He worked with us diligently to help us understand the language, and my textbook is filled with my own annotations as we read “The Parlement of Foules” (with that great opening that needs no annotation: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne”) and “Troilus and Criseyde” before tackling Chaucer’s most famous work, those ribald tales mentioned earlier. (Click on the graphic above to see a larger version of one of my annotated pages.)

As if struggling with Middle English wasn’t enough, we also had to write a term paper. I wrote about the great schism in the Roman Catholic Church. Finding the time to research such a paper proved to be a challenge and I did what a lot of townies do during a home football game—use the lull to run errands. I ran my errands in the stacks of Pattee Library. I had the place virtually to myself.

I sorted through the names of popes legal and illegal trying to figure out who was in charge of the Vatican during any given period between 1378 and 1455. My library sources consisted of “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Medieval Papacy,” “The History of the Popes,” “Medieval Panorama,” and “A Popular History of Priestcraft in All Ages and Nations.” Light reading all.

My Chaucer textbook survived several moves, but I don’t think I ever looked at it again until I started to write this essay. It stirred many memories of that fall in 1970, but my best memory was of the comment Professor Rosenberg wrote in red ink on my paper underneath the grade, an A:

“This is as clear a presentation as I’ve seen in an undergraduate paper; good job!”

I still have the paper. It was a memorable fall.

Ray and Rudy

2009-04-09T06:38:00.000-06:00

When I was in high school, I was one of the student managers for the high school basketball team. As a senior, I had rank and privilege, and that meant that after the games, instead of cleaning up the locker room and making sure the towels got to the laundry and the orange peels got to the trash, I got to call the area newspapers and report the game results. That’s how I came to know Ray Saul and Rudy Bednar, both of whom died earlier this year. Both were 82.

This was 1960-61 and I would call Rudy at the Lansford office of the Allentown Morning Call. For Ray, I would call the Hazleton Speaker’s office, although I didn’t always speak to Ray. Their newspapers were both regional morning papers and, in my world, exotic creatures. All I knew was the afternoon Evening Courier, which is where I ultimately began my professional journalism career (see One Man’s Newspaper History in the February section of this blog).

In my two years as the sportswriter at the Courier, I got to know Rudy and Ray much better. Both men were good mentors for me and willing to help me as needed. In fact, Ray hired me to take boxscores over the phone in 1967-68 when I was a freshman at the Hazleton campus of Penn State. It was the other side of my job as the high school senior basketball manager.

I don’t remember the last time I saw Rudy. I joined the Navy in September 1963 and I am pretty sure I never saw him after I was discharged and went to college. I was surprised to read in his obituary that he was not only a Navy veteran, but, like me, a radioman. So we would have had much to discuss.

His obituary reminded me that he not only wrote, but also took photographs. Today more and more editors expect reporters not only to take notes and write stories, but do the photography as well. With digital, that’s a lot easier than it used to be. Rudy’s work was more complicated because he was shooting in the days of bulky speed graphics with flashbulbs.

But I never heard him complain once about work. He loved it, which is what made him such a good mentor. He spent his entire career at the Morning Call, moving to Lehighton when the Lansford office was closed. His obituary said he worked at the Call for 40 years.

Ray Saul also loved his job and spent his entire career at one newspaper, which eventually merged with its afternoon sister, the Plain Speaker, and became the Standard-Speaker. Ray went from sports editor to editor and I was pleased to be able to attend his retirement fete at the Conyngham Valley Country Club.

One of the best stories I can tell about Ray is the time we were covering a Tamaqua-Hazleton High game at Hazleton and the mosquitoes were so bad he gave each one of us in the pressbox a cigar, urged us to light up and smoke the annoyances into oblivion. I don’t recall if it worked, but I do remember that it was a pretty good cigar. Ray liked good cigars, as you can see in the photo above, which is Ray on his last day of work. (Well, his last day as editor; he kept writing for the paper and his last column was published after he died.)

Ray also served in the Navy and the Naval Reserve as an officer. He was also a Penn State journalism graduate and very loyal to the university. Every time we met during my tenure as a faculty member, the conversation covered the Navy and Penn State.
He used to joke that people could never figure out his ethnicity because his first name was Spanish (Ramon) and his surname was Jewish. But he was really Italian and Albanian, my Hazleton-based fact-checker tells me.

One of the things that jumped out at me in the obituaries of both of these men was their devotion to their church and their community. Even after they retired, they were active, and frequently worked in activities that helped young people. They understood giving back and serving as mentors.

But, then, I knew that.

A Budding Pixel Painter?

2009-04-02T12:41:00.000-06:00

“You ought to take a painting course,” my wife said to me one day as I debriefed her on what had gone on in her three-hour course that morning at Santa Fe Community College. She said she was learning more about colors, and I mentioned that my InDesign instructor had suggested that her students take the media arts course in color.

I was intrigued by my wife’s idea and suggested I might do it IF I could paint in class on my laptop computer rather than using brushes and paints, etc. A painter puritan, she was aghast.

“It’s not the same,” she argued. Well, yes, I agreed, but I pointed out that what I really wanted to learn was how to paint on my graphic tablet (and my touch-screen laptop).

She came back with all of the arguments: You don’t work with real paint; the paper’s not the same—ah, but you can imitate papers on a computer; and so forth.

We agreed that when we went to her instructor’s home for an open house, I could lobby the instructor and see if she’d let me in her course using modern tools rather than ancient ones.

In the meantime, we spent 14 days babysitting one of our granddaughters and that gave me some time to, well, not exactly paint, but doodle. Part of our duties included selling books at our granddaughter’s elementary school, and when I noticed that one mother had purchased a book on drawing, I found the mother lode and bought all four.

Inspired, I spent a little time doing a few of the lessons, although in some cases I would say they were too complex for someone in elementary school. I did best recreating Hello Kitty characters, which essentially are outlines of shapes and somewhat easy to draw, and had a difficult time recreating Avatar The Last Airbender because the lessons started me drawing an internal outline from which I worked my way out to the final result. It was just too many lines to keep track of. (We did watch him on television, but that didn’t help.)

Back in Santa Fe, I “painted” the above drawing just for this blog. You can view it two ways: I should stick to writing or I could learn a lot in a painting class. At least I didn’t sign it.

I leave you with the question I more or less posed at the beginning: Why can’t I be a pixel painter in a class of brush painters?

(I’ll let you know what my wife’s instructor says.)

Elegy for My English Teachers

2009-03-09T07:15:00.000-06:00

TO this day, I swear the only reason I got through Kathryn Wenzel's 9^th grade English course was because I was taking Winifred Jones' beginning Latin course at the same time. In those days English's rules were about the same as Latin's.

In 10^th grade, my English teacher was also my Latin teacher. I forget the Latin lessons, but I'll never forget the English lessons. H. Paul Jewells, whose nickname was "Pappy," had an array of acronyms for assignments. When we studied a part of speech we had to "DIP," that is, define, illustrate and prove. I forget what he told us about verbs, but when I started writing this essay "DIP" came right back to me. A physical fitness buff, a man with a perfect posture, he died of a heart attack shortly after retiring.

I can also recite Portia's plea for mercy from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, thanks to my 8th-grade English teacher, Louise Kellner. Miss Kellner became quite dramatic in her rendition and we knew that to do anything less was to invite a lower grade. Who said the quality of osmosis isn't high?

I did not do as well with Shakespeare in 12^th grade because my analysis of Hamlet did not square with what my teacher had learned in college (Goucher). After all, I took the side of Hamlet's stepfather, which I wouldn't do today. I was on the right side when we read The Ugly American.

My 11^th-grade English teacher was also an assistant football coach and later became a head coach at other schools. He taught us vocabulary and critical reading, which I began to doubt the day one of my buddies said an essay we had read "lacks colorful words" and he got a nod of approval from our teacher, who had just made the same observation about an earlier essay. Osmosis works again!

More than 20 years ago, I published a book on language skills, which included this observation: "And I cannot say enough good about the six high school English teachers who helped shape my attitude toward the language. Rarely can a person boast of having had six good high school English teachers."

Unfortunately, even after looking through five yearbooks, I cannot recall who the sixth teacher was, the one in 7^th grade. I think it was Miss Wenzel's younger sister Irma, who was also my 8^th-grade geography teacher. Irma was not as stern as Kathryn, although her standards were just as high.

Irma died in 1980. I know that because I read it in Kathryn's obituary. She was 90. She is survived by a niece and three grand nieces—and me.

The Stereoscope

2009-03-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

THE other day at brunch my older sister told me she had a box for me in her car. She didn’t say anything about the contents of the box other than to say they were “legacy” items. I waited until I got home to open it.

Inside, carefully wrapped, were my Welsh grandfather’s naturalization papers and a wedding certificate for my maternal grandparents. At the bottom of the box were two items wrapped in newspapers (modern, not historical, unfortunately). I was delighted to find a stereoscope and slides that I can remember looking at as a child about 60 years ago (see photo above—the stereoscope, not me).

There are two sets of slides and then six loose ones. The sets focus on courtship and marriage, and the story of Christ from his birth to the ascension. The slides are dated 1901 and 1905 respectively. (One slide is of a girl fishing, which I’ve inserted in the stereoscope in the photo above.)

It was not until I viewed a slide in the stereoscope that I realized the images were 3-D and very sharp. I had forgotten what they were like.

The 3-D effect was created by giving the reader two nearly identical photographs, processed in the brain as three dimensional. (I had to do some research to learn that.) Frankly, I thought the result was sharper than the 3-D commercials we watched with 3-D glasses during this year’s Super Bowl.

If I remember correctly, even in the early 1950s the stereoscope was something of a relic. I already had a Viewmaster (spelled different ways) in which the user inserted a round disc that contained the slides. Then you pressed down on a lever on the right side to advance the slides one by one in 3-D. That was certainly a lot more efficient than the stereoscope, which you had to put down to replace the slide.

By today’s standards, my stereoscope is an antique and the Viewmasters I’ve seen on eBay are labeled “vintage.” (What does that make me?)

Thanks to Google, I learned that View-Masters are sold today by Fisher Price and come in all kinds of shapes. Amazon sells a model it labels “classic” because it looks like the one I had as a child.

For some, it may be time to put away childish things. For me, it appears it’s time to rediscover them. Everything old is new again. What fun!

Haiku in the News

2009-03-02T17:53:00.001-07:00

NORMALLY I wouldn't deviate from a weekly post, but Monday's New York Times has a story that somewhat relates to my earlier essay on haiku (see Haiku Afternoon under February). The story appears on the bottom of of the Arts section and focuses on objections to the blue horse statue at Denver International Airport. Even though the creator (now deceased) was from New Mexico, the story wouldn't merit a post here--except the people who are protesting are putting their comments on a website in haiku. See And Behold a Big Blue Horse? Many in Denver Just Say Neigh

Book review: The Photographer’s Guide to New Mexico: Where to Find Perfect Shots and How to Take Them by Efraín M. Padró

2009-02-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Photographer’s Guide to New Mexico: Where to Find Perfect Shots and How to Take Them. Efraín M. Padró. The Countryman Press. Woodstock, Vermont. 96pp. $14.95

Even before I bought this book, I knew I was going to like it. My wife and I have taken two workshops with the author, one at White Sands and the other in Las Cruces, and are ready for another. I am a big fan of Efraín M. Padró’s.

Because he and I are on a first-name basis, I’ll refer to the author/photographer as Efraín.

Efraín, who’s based in Santa Fe, begins the book with a four-page section titled “How I Photograph New Mexico.” It’s right out of his workshops, and for those of us who want to be better photographers, I can attest that it’s a value-packed four pages. One thing Efraín recommends that I’ve started to do more of: If he’s not shooting something in motion, he usually sets his ISO to 100 and uses a tripod.

One very important section in the opening is a short piece on etiquette when photographing on Native American soil. For those accustomed to being around Amish or other insular groups, the information will be redundant. Nevertheless, it’s worth repeating.

Efraín has divided the book into geographical areas and within the divisions suggested places to photograph. So Northwest New Mexico lists Shiprock, El Morro and Acoma Sky City among the 11 sites. North Central includes Taos and Santa Fe. Albuquerque shows up in Central New Mexico, and the two places Paulette and I have been with Efraín, Las Cruces and White Sands, appear in Southwest and Southeast New Mexico.

The author, who includes many of his own photographs in here, not only provides seasonal ratings for each area, but suggests lenses and filters for shooting certain events. He warns you if you’re going to encounter a low-light situation (and would need a tripod) and he advises on the best times to photograph (morning and evening, which are fairly universal, as he notes). He also suggests where to stand to capture the best light depending on the time of day. Sunrises and sunsets in New Mexico provide different lighting depending on where you’re standing and what the cloud cover is like.

Efraín concludes with his list of favorite sites, which he acknowledges is subjective.

Even if you are not a serious photographer or a wannabe like me, the book is invaluable as a guide to the sites and sights of photogenic New Mexico. About the only thing missing is a restaurant guide, and given the high number of good restaurants in New Mexico, such a guide would be unnecessary.

Remembering Ed Leos

2009-02-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

I try to imagine how many of the late Ed Leos’ students remember when they lift a camera’s viewfinder to their eye to snap a photo what he taught them so many decades ago. Ed belonged to the be-ready-at-all-times school of photojournalism and one of the second things he taught his students in his beginning journalism class was to carry their camera hanging by the strap from their left shoulder so if something worth photographing happened, the student could quickly swing his camera to his eye and take a photograph.

Of course, the first thing he taught his students was: Always have your camera with you.

Ed was my colleague in the School of Journalism at Penn State, and when his retirement was fast approaching in the spring of 1978, he allowed me to audit his beginning photojournalism class. It was more than a course in photojournalism.

Ed died in November at the age of 92. Born during World War I, he was a teenager during the Depression and served in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theatre and stateside in World War II.

I still have the mimeographed handouts Ed gave us. They are the first thing I see when I open my initial three-ring binder of black and white negatives, a binder that grew to six in number before I stopped processing my own film and used a commercial developer. Two of the handout titles: “Control Of Temperature In Film Processing” and “On Submitting Assignments.” It wasn’t enough to turn in an assignment by deadline. “No deadline is met,” one handout says, “unless every print and contact sheet is fully identified.” Full identification meant name, address, location of photographs or name of subject, date, negative number.

Students would rush into class from the darkroom with wet prints just so they could make deadline. Then they would sit at tables while Ed stood at the front of the room and talked about photography. He didn’t talk about how to cover a three-alarm fire or a three-car accident. He talked about art.

One of his favorite examples was the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. He would show us her paintings and comparable photographs. He wanted us to see that we could take a photo that might resemble an O’Keeffe painting. But even while he was pushing us to aim high, he was still providing practical lessons, some that went beyond photography.

For example, while many photographers would make 8x10-inch test prints to see where adjustments were necessary, Ed made us cut the paper into narrow strips and we got several strips out of one piece of paper. Think of the paper we saved. (In those days, paper and film were given to students and the cameras were loaners.) We rolled our own film rather than buying film from a camera store. We recycled as much as we could.

I recall a story one of Ed’s contemporaries used to tell about him. In those days, the university was not allowed to roll over any money it had received from the state and so late in the year we would get a memo from the dean telling us that he had leftover money and if anyone needed supplies, put in a request. Well, a photojournalism course is more apt than, say, a history course to need supplies—new cameras, a paper cutter, trays, what have you.

But what my other colleague pointed out was that no sooner did the dean’s memo reach our mailboxes than Ed’s list was on the way to the dean’s office. Ed was ready. He carried his camera on his left shoulder and his supply list in his coat pocket.

Another thing I learned from Ed was how to see. Most people will take photographs one way and not consider changing the position of their camera from horizontal to vertical. He urged us to turn the camera and get a different view.

That wasn’t all. I recall bumping into him one day on the main walkway at Penn State. He was holding his camera in one hand with his arm extended to the sidewalk and more or less pointing the camera at passers-by. He was taking candid photographs just for fun. Since this was the pre-digital era, he couldn’t quickly check to see what he was getting but had to return to his home and develop the film. To my knowledge, he never exhibited any prints from that experiment. He just wanted to experiment, to get a different view.

Some of us on the faculty got together with Ed a couple of times after he retired. One time he exhibited in the student union building at Penn State and I have photos of the event. There’s Ed wearing his bolo. Later, we had lunch and I remember Ed telling us that he no longer took photographs. His eyesight was fading. It has to be the worst thing that can happen to a photographer.

He had seen a lot in his day and accepted the dying of the light. He was frugal, practical, aesthetical and philosophical. He made for a great photojournalism instructor and colleague. I still practice what he preached.

Haiku Afternoon

2009-02-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

I recently took a four-hour class in haiku, which as most of you know is a form of Japanese poetry. As you probably also know, it’s three lines of five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables—and no rhyming. (I’m using the word syllables loosely because there’s a translation glitch between the Japanese phrase and English.) I wrote three right off the bat.

the minimalist

searches for his meter

and finds it here

Albuquerque box

above the city below

hot air balloons rise

I stand up without notice

Lucy leaps to all four feet

time for her walk

The Albuquerque box haiku was inspired by a photo I had in my folder and which appears here.

Then we had to write a haiku about something first (first kiss, first, ah, you get it).

awaken to a rocking feeling

not there the night before—

I need my sealegs now

Back to a photo I had taken on the 200^th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday.

two ravens in a tree

backlit by the rising sun—

his 200^th anniversary

Then we had to write a tanka, which is a haiku with an additional two lines of seven syllables. Even though I confessed to having used a previous (but unread) haiku, my instructor liked my tanka:

two ravens in a tree

backlit by the rising sun

his 200^th anniversary—

a playoff game the night before

Ravens of a different sort

Finally we watched some nature slides and wrote one more haiku. In my housing development when it rains really hard during the summer and the holding ponds fill up (we call it the monsoon season), toads come out and croak loudly as a way of attracting a mate. My wife says it sounds like Jurassic Park.

monsoons upon us

the holding ponds fill up

the mating toads sing

At least I didn’t call them horny toads.

We ended the afternoon by writing two renkus. A renku begins with one person writing a haiku and the next person adding two lines of seven syllables followed by someone adding a haiku followed by someone adding two lines of seven syllables until we run out of people. Our instructor said she would try to get both poems published.

a gathering of words

assembled by a group

published poets all

One Man’s Newspaper History

2009-02-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with newspapers when I was in senior high. Yes, I had looked at newspapers before that and had even been a newspaper boy (as they were called before the gender-neutral term “carrier” went into effect). But love came in my senior year when I realized that the only way I could get close to the girl I had a crush on was to join the staff of my high school newspaper.

She was the editor.

Alas, nothing came of the romance, but consider what it did for me. While still in high school, I became a stringer for my local newspaper in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, The Evening Courier, and then, upon graduation, its only sportswriter. The publisher said he hired me partly on the strength of a recommendation from his next-door neighbor, who said I had a good work ethic.

The neighbor was, in one of those life coincidences, the editor of my high school newspaper. Although I never got to first base with the high school editor and haven’t seen her since graduation day in 1961 (she became a missionary, and if you know me, you can see that would have never worked), I did end up with a great career because of the newspaper business. Now retired, I sit on the sidelines and watch as newspapers continue their downward spiral. And while many people are lamenting the current situation, I need to point out that the spiral did not start yesterday, but can be traced back nearly 100 years.

In my academic career, I helped chronicle the decline, starting with my master’s thesis, “The Death of a Small-Town Daily.” The thesis examined the demise of the Courier, the newspaper that gave me my first paying job in 1961 and disappeared in 1971, subsumed by a neighboring newspaper that subsumed two others and became a regional newspaper. Later I assisted Ben Bagdikian in a national study on why newspapers did or did not survive in the 1960s. That’s enough to make me an expert.

I checked my master’s thesis and found that the highest number of daily newspapers in the United States was recorded in 1910. Then we had 2,200 dailies. The latest figures I can find put the number at around 1,400.

The signs have always been there, although perhaps not as dramatically as they are now, when it’s not small-town dailies being subsumed, but metropolitan newspapers going bankrupt. Of course, today all businesses are suffering. Given that newspapers rely on advertising for revenue and businesses don’t advertise as much in bad economic times, newspapers are taking a hit from which many probably will not recover. Let’s face it: As long as the populations grows, there will be people to buy cars and houses and furniture, but whether or not those businesses advertise in newspapers is not so certain.

As I write this on my computer, having already skimmed headlines in six online newspapers (two from Australia) and having read the hard copy of my local newspaper while eating my breakfast, I worry more about the future of news rather than the future of newspapers. When I was a young city editor, we used to joke about the local radio station using our stories on the air—without credit—even though you could hear the reader turning the pages of the newspaper to read the rest of the story. (It was also funny when the story didn’t continue to the designated page and the reader was left to figure out how to go on from mid-sentence.) Today I note to my wife as we watch the news on television how many stories were first reported in that morning’s New York Times. If it weren’t for The New York Times, conservative talk-show host Bill O’Reilly would be at a loss for words, lacking a simultaneous source and target.

Google News and similar news collection sites use stories from the AP and papers such as the Times, but they cannot replace them. Can you imagine a Google News reporter going to a hot spot to cover a story? No way. News organizations such as the AP and the Times devote time and money to in-depth articles that Google News merely aggregates rather than develops on its own. That’s the strength of newspapers and that’s what we’re going to be poorer for as the downward spiral continues.

My Grandfather's Slides

2009-01-30T07:27:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I praised a Facebook friend’s photographs of people, saying that they showed character। In turn, I went looking for the negatives of a portrait I had done back in the late 70s of a woman who lived in a senior citizen high-rise apartment building in the Coal Regions (always capitalized). I never found the negatives, but I did stumble onto a box of slides that my oldest sister (now deceased) had passed on to me from our father (now deceased). His father, my paternal grandfather, had taken the slides.

Because of marital separation (when I was 5) and later divorce, I never knew the paternal side of my family very well। I learned, for example, when I went to work for my local newspaper after graduating from high school that my grandfather was quite famous (locally) for his gladioli.

The box of slides confirms that। Along with six magazines well captioned there is an array of loose slides and almost every one is of a flower or a bush or a tree. I can’t be sure, but I infer from the captions he provided, he not only photographed his handiwork, but the handiwork of neighbors.

He also documented some of the trips he and my grandmother went on. Usually, they visited one of their daughters (and my aunt, one of my father’s three sisters) in Ohio and some of the photos are of the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes। (I’m assuming my aunt’s husband drove and my grandfather took photos from the passenger’s seat. I don’t think he drove and photographed!)

The slides were shot between 1958 and 1962. The last magazine I scanned were of an international gladioli show in Wheeling, West Virginia. When I think of West Virginia, I think of coal, not gladioli।

For some reason, perhaps a Germanic respect for privacy or his own shyness, he did not photograph many people। Flowers, rivers, tow boats, barges—even a parking lot--are frequent subjects, but only five or six of the estimated 300 slides have people we know. My cousin, the daughter of the aunt mentioned above, has identified her mother, father, some of her brothers, our grandparents and one cousin on some of the slides. Most of those people are now deceased.

Even though the photographer is dead, the slides speak। Not only do we know what attracted his photo eye, we also know that he was meticulous in his captioning. On each slide holder, he has carefully written about the subject of the slide. (The one with several relatives, however, is merely captioned “Folks at motel.”) Each magazine is numbered, which reveals to me that I don’t have all of his slides. I have magazines 8, 17, 18, 20, 21 and 23. Conversations with two of my paternal cousins reveal that they don’t have the missing magazines. That ends this project, it seems.

But it has been interesting scanning in each slide. Almost a half century later, I learn something new about one of my grandparents, preserved through his passion for flowers and photography.