Category Archives: Media

Notes from a quiet street—October, 2018

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Get your speculation machines turned on.   Someone asked the other day, “If Josh Hawley is elected to the U. S. Senate in November, who do you think Governor Parson will appoint to finish Hawley’s term?”

Well…..?

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In a long life, a person is likely to make some interesting friends.  Well, all friends are interesting or they wouldn’t be friends, would they?  And if you’re lucky, you get to go to interesting places that broaden your perspective on the world and your place in it.  Some who read these entries might be scornful of those, such as your correspondent, who can see beyond the concrete, steel, and glass of the big cities and can cherish the big and the small worlds that surround us.

A friend in Indianapolis is the Executive Director of the Indianapolis Prize, the world’s leading prize for animal conservation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UARcO8jTVk0

This year’s prize went to Dr. Russell Mittemeier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=207&v=OqeoeDg-CTo

Harrison Ford flew to Indianapolis to attend the awards dinner.  Nice guy, said those who met him.   Why are we surprised to learn that big-time people we admire from afar are nice?

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In my news director days I sometimes reminded myself and my reporters that it was not always necessary to do a story about an event if nothing was done or said worth reporting.  If a committee or a commission or a council met for three hours but did nothing newsworthy, there was no reason for any of us to waste our listeners’ time by saying a meeting was held and then trying to find something in our notes or on our recorders to write or let people hear that had no purpose other than to justify our presence at the meeting.  “It’s just three hours of your life that you’ll never get back,” I sometimes counseled the news staff.  “Don’t spend any more time trying to find something not worth the time to put on the air.”

Somebody else had the same philosophy a long time ago. From the Jefferson City Daily Capital News of May 10, 1945:

Gov. Phil M. Donnelly yesterday held his first press conference in four days but it was unproductive of printing news.

We were told by a reporter who covered him that Donnelly used to hold two news conferences a day. One in the morning was for reporters from afternoon newspapers.  The one in the afternoon was for reporters from morning papers. He had more news conferences in a month than some governors have in a year.  Or two.

We also had a lot more reporters covering the capitol.

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Some of the saddest places are baseball diamonds in city parks and baseball parks in the big cities when there’s no more baseball to be played. Especially by January. With a little snow. Even hope has left.

But we’ll find it in Arizona and Florida in February.

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A restaurant sign seen from across the room recently:

It raises a question.  Does the sign mean the place isn’t all that dangerous?  Or does it mean that people who eat there live longer?

I rolled the dice.  I had a big breakfast.  So far, so good.

Sounding the bugle call to public office

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—and why it’s a good idea to know who’s blowing it and how.

We pause this week in our reveries about Africa as we reach the halfway point between the primary election and the general election to share a story that we hope reminds voters that it is wise to be careful about all of the rhetorical horn blowing that is part of today’s campaigns.

Your faithful observer and listener once heard Hughes Rudd tell the story, “Bugle Call of a Georgia Mule,” at an economic development conference at the old Ramada Inn in Jefferson City. This was in the early to mid-1970s.

Rudd (in this old CBS News photo) was a Texas-born fellow who still had a pronounced Texas twang in his gravelly voice as he told stories on newscasts, commentaries, and on the speaking circuit.  He was called by various observers “bright and bristly,” or “deft (and) sardonic,” or “puckish (and) curmudgeonly.”  He achieved his greatest popularity as a correspondent for CBS and then for ABC. He used to finish his daily newscasts with two-minute commentaries that Ted Koppel referred to as “evenhanded malice.”

Rudd didn’t read the news. He told news stories. And that’s why he was so popular. Rudd, who died at the age of 71 in 1992, had come north to study journalism at the University of Missouri but quit after three years to join the Army Air Corps early in World War II.  He had 20/40 vision in one eye so the AAC sent him to the regular Army where he became a spotter pilot for artillery batteries.

Somebody, somewhere (maybe Rudd for all I know), wrote the story I heard Hughes Rudd tell that day in Jefferson City to an audience that became increasingly amused as the story went along.  We pass it along to remind political candidates they’d best know what they’re talking about.

One fine Georgia evening a Mrs. George Wood, now deceased, called a Dr. Marvin Satterfield, a veterinarian in Hardwicke, from her home in Bryan County. It was about her mule, Horace.  She was upset and said, “Doctor, Horace is sick and I wish you would come out and take a look at him.”

The sun was setting, but there was still plenty of daylight to see by.  After asking a few questions and hearing the answers, Dr. Satterfield said, ”It’s after six o’clock and I’m eating supper.  Give him a dose of mineral oil and if he isn’t all right in the morning, phone me and I’ll come and take a look at your mule. 

She wanted to know how to give the mule the oil so the doctor said it should be through a funnel.  Mrs. Wood protested that the mule might bite her. Then Dr. Satterfield, a bit exasperated, said, “You’re a farm woman and you should know about these things.  Give it to him in the other end.’ 

Mrs. Wood went down to the barn and there stood Horace, moaning and groaning and banging his head. He certainly looked sick.  She searched for a funnel, but the nearest thing she could find was her Uncle Bill’s fox hunting horn hanging on the wall. It was a beautiful gold-plated instrument with silver tassels. She took the horn and affixed it properly.  Horace paid no attention so she was encouraged.

Then, she reached up on the shelf where the farm medicines were kept. Instead of picking up the mineral oil, nervously, she grabbed a bottle of turpentine and poured a liberal dose of it into the horn.

Horace’s head shot up with a sudden jerk and he stood dead still at attention for maybe three seconds.   Then he let out a bellow that could be heard a mile down the road.  He reared up on his hind legs, brought his front legs down, knocked out one side of the barn, cleared a five-foot fence, and started down the road at a mad gallop.  Since Horace was loaded with gas, every few jumps he made, the horn would blow.

All the hounds in the neighborhood knew when the horn was blowing, it meant Uncle Bill was going foxhunting. So out on the road they went, following close behind Horace the mule.

People who witnessed the chase said it was an unforgettable sight. First Horace, running at top speed with a horn in a most unusual position, the mellow notes issuing therefrom, the silver tassels waving and the dogs barking joyously.

They passed the home of old man Harvey Hogan, who was sitting on his front porch. It was said that Mr. Hogan had not drawn a sober breath in 15 years.  He gazed in fascinated amazement at the sight before his eyes. Up until this day he hasn’t touched another drop.

By this time, it was good and dark. Horace and the dogs were coming to the Intracoastal Waterway.  The bridge tender heard the horn blowing frantically and figured that a fast boat was approaching.  He hurriedly went out and cranked up the bridge. Horace went kerplunk into the water and drowned.  The pack of dogs went into the water, too. They all swam out without much difficulty.

What makes the story doubly interesting is that the bridge tender was also the sheriff of Bryan County and was running for re-election at the time.  When the election day came, he managed to get only seven votes and those were from kinfolks.

Those who took the trouble to analyze the election said the people figured any man who didn’t know the difference between a mule with a fox horn up his caboose and a boat coming down the Intracoastal Waterway wasn’t fit to hold public office anyway.  

That’s the story Hughes Rudd told that day in Jefferson City.  We offer it in this campaign season to those who think they have heard a bugle call to public service.  We guess citizens will be the ones who decide which end of the mule summoned the candidate to the ballot and will vote accordingly.

Banned for insulting the president

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Some (maybe many) people have never trusted me.  Some people have been afraid of me.  Some people dislike me.

Because I am a reporter.  I am a journalist.

I am an enemy of the people.

Some people.

They are most often people in power.  And their strongest supporters.

Even now, when I do not daily roam the halls of political power, some consider me an enemy because of what I write.

I am an enemy of SOME people.

And because they think I am their enemy, they do their best to convince a general public that I am its enemy, too.

And their constant efforts to undermine the institutions of democracy—not just the press—are paying off, it seems.

Sam Stein, who writes for the politics and popular culture website The Daily Beast, wrote a few days ago of a new public opinion poll done by the Ipsos marketing and opinion research group that says almost half of self-identified Republicans think “the news media is the enemy of the American people.”   Only about one-fourth of that group disagreed.  And almost eighty percent of those surveyed think the mainstream media is unfair to President Trump.

Further, says the poll, forty-three percent of those self-identified Republicans think President Trump should be given authority to shut down news outlets “engaged in bad behavior.”

Whatever that means.

Almost one-fourth of those folks agreed that the President should be able to close The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and other news organizations that apparently don’t willingly accept the Trump world view.

It’s no surprise that the poll found Democrats sharply disagree.  But twelve percent of Democrats and one-fourth of the Independents surveyed feel that people like me are enemies of the American people.

Twelve percent of self-identified D’s and twenty percent of the I’s agree that President Trump should be able to stop the presses and turn off the cameras for newspapers and television networks he doesn’t like.

People like me have not felt so honored since Spiro Agnew referred to us as “nattering nabobs of negativity” in the Watergate days of the Nixon administration.  But yesterday’s “nattering nabobs” continued to natter and history records who was more truthful about what had been going on.

This survey brings to mind an article discovered in The Guardian, an eastern African newspaper I picked up in Arusha, Tanzania a few days ago.  The Tanzanian deputy minister for information, culture, arts and sports, Anastazia Wambura, had banned publication of the weekly paper MwanaHalisi last September for two years because of government-claimed “unethical reporting, the publishing of fabricated and inciting articles, and endangering national security.”

It seems the newspaper was accused of sedition for asking, “Whom should Tanzanians pray for, the President, or Tundu Lissu, a Tanzanian lawyer and opposition politician” who had been arrested a half-dozen times last year including the final time—a year ago this month—for “insulting the President.”   He had been shot eight times in the stomach and legs nine days before the newspaper was banned for “unethical reporting,” etc.

But the High Court in Dar es Salaam threw out the ban on July 24. The government information ministry did not report the reversal. But The Guardian let readers known the government had crossed a line in banning the newspaper. The editor of MwanaHalisi announced the shutdown had cost the newspaper 2.2 billion shillings (not quite one-million US dollars), and the newspaper was going to sue Wambura for damages.

So there’s an example of what happens in a country where the government defines “enemy of the people” and thinks it has the power to do something about them.

Enemies of the people spreading fake news.  That, apparently, is people like me.

Richard Nixon had his list of enemies of the people spreading fake news.  We know that didn’t turn out well for him.

Government officials and government in general prefer not to be held accountable, not to be questioned either about their motivations, the legitimacy of their implied or emplaced policies, or held accountable for the results of their statements and actions. And it gets worse as they climb higher up the political food chain.  As they rise, they find it more expedient and more politically advantageous to attack the integrity of those who ask the questions rather than explain their possible lack of integrity that has generated those questions.  And the bigger megaphone they get as they rise higher, the more people are inclined to accept what they say or do as unquestionable gospel or as unquestionable action.  So it is that a segment of the public willingly forfeits one of its greatest responsibilities of citizenship—holding accountable those they place in high position—and accepts the idea that those who seek that accountability on their behalf are in some way liars and even traitors.  

Questioning the statements or actions of those in authority is a healthy virtue of citizenship. And there’s no harm in questioning the fairness of those who have the most direct access to those who need to be questioned. 

But to advocate keeping those with the most direct access—the press—from asking the questions is tragic.  We might ask questions you would prefer not be asked.  But those in high leadership positions have their own mouthpieces. It is not the role of the press to be another one.

One of the penalties of freedom as well as one of the great virtues of freedom is the ability to question authority. Because it NEEDS to be questioned.  Always.

And it’s the press that has the access to ask those questions.

The Ipsos survey does have some reassuring results for people like me, we suppose.  Almost sixty percent of ALL respondents believe journalists are “necessary to keep the Trump administration honest.”  The percentage of Republicans agreeing with that idea slightly outweighed those who disagreed—39-35 percent.  And eighty-five percent of all respondents think “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy.”

The survey says almost three-fourths of all respondents think it should be easier to sue reporters who knowingly publish false information (eighty-five percent Republicans, sixty-three percent Democrats).

Folks, we’ve got (real) news for you.  Laws on libel and slander provide that right, although people in high public places are limited—and the shutdown of the newspaper in Africa is an example of why those with the power to control information should be limited although we do have instances where people, and companies with power, file libel and slander suits to bankrupt people who have told the truth or who have sought it.

The United States Constitution’s guarantees of First Amendment freedoms establishes a sometimes-awkward confrontation of rights.  The news media are free to publish and presidents as well as private citizens of all stripes are free to talk.  Whether we like it or not, irresponsible speech and irresponsible comments are a price we have to bear so that we might speak our own minds and think our own thoughts whether we buy ink by the barrel, use a microphone to magnify our voices, or make disparaging comments about each other at the coffee shop.

The media structure of our nation is in great flux today because of the rise of personal information devices that can isolate people within their own opinions and protect them from considering ideas of others that might change their thinking.  But advocating a system that prohibits and punishes those whose opinions differ from yours is extremely dangerous, or could be if the political winds change direction.

The journalist, the reporter rather than the commentator, is the one most likely to ferret out the truth.  Scripture tells us that the truth will make us free.  Perhaps it is better to say in these times that the freedom to search for the truth is what keeps us free.

In a time when so many are encouraged not to search, those who are unafraid to light a lantern against the darkness are sometimes considered enemies. We should always pray that there are always those with the courage to turn on that lantern.  Limiting or endangering their freedom is the surest way to limit or endanger the freedoms we all must sustain.

Call us all the names you wish, people like me will not give up our lanterns.

Finally, we have a group photo

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Nancy and I returned last week from a trip to Africa.  We’ll be writing a lot about that in future entries but we saw and did so much that it is taking some time to sort things out and go through all the pictures we took (thank Heaven for digital cameras).   Today, we want to do some reminiscing about some old friends who are together this week for the first time in, probably, forty years.

It will be 44 years ago this December that three young men began to work together on what became The Missourinet.

Jeff Smith, Chuck Morris, and me.

We never had our picture taken together. Until this week.

The story of The Missourinet goes back several years before 1974, however, and it begins on the top floor of a rickety old building now long-gone at 410 East Capitol Avenue.  It was the home of a radio station that no longer operates in Jefferson City and the building was so old and unstable that anyone who slammed the front door down on the first floor (which I think was originally the basement of a century-old—and more—house was likely to cause the needle to jump on a record in a second-floor studio.

The production studio of the station was in the living room of the old house. The fireplace was still there and occasionally a bird would fall down the fireplace and go batting around the room frantically trying to get out.   Once, a bird got through the ventilation system and into the adjoining news booth, a cubicle about four by five feet or so, where it rested in the comfortable near-darkness until I walked in and turned on the light for the first newscast of the morning. The bird really went nuts and I stepped back and held the door open until it could go nuts in another part of the building while I went on with the newscast.

Later, when the station added an FM station, a small studio was built inside the living room/production room.  A bird got into the FM studio one day and in its excitement delivered a deposit onto a record that was being played.  I don’t think the announcer ever explained why the broadcast was briefly interrupted; I don’t think there was a way he could have explained it.

Well, anyway, a year or so after I became news director, a young fellow came to work as my assistant. His name was Clyde Lear, a really sharp fresh graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, the first Plan B master’s degree student.

Plan B was something new at the school. It was for people who didn’t want to go on for a doctorate and found the strong research part of the original master’s program not real useful to someone who wanted to get out and report.  So Plan B was created and it involved writing a paper rather than a thesis.

Clyde’s paper was about the creation of a state radio network.   We sometimes talked about the idea when things got slow in the newsroom.

Just down the hall, in another decrepit room, was the office for the farm director and the program director.  This was all on the third, top, floor of the old building, a room where (I swear), you could raise the windows and the sash would go up but the glass would stay in place.

The farm director was Derry Brownfield and he had a dream, too, for a statewide agriculture network. Before too long, Clyde and Derry started talking.

Clyde was a terrific reporter.  Didn’t know beans about sports, which the news staff sometimes had to do.  He sold Bibles and other religious books during the summer vacations from college and he sold a ton of them.  Frankly, Bible-selling was more lucrative than radio journalism, and Clyde decided after a time that he and his growing family just couldn’t make it on $95 a week (I think I was making 125).   So he left to sell pavement sealer for a local lumber dealer, Buel Baclesse—whose wife ran a fabric shop next to the lumberyard on Dunklin Street.   He and Derry kept in touch.

They finally decided to do the network thing.  Agriculture first and then news.   They talked to some folks and got some other folks to co-sign bank notes to get started. The first studio was in the now-former fabric shop.   Clyde did all the wiring, all the commercial-selling, all the affiliate sign-ups, and Derry did the news and the markets.  They started, I think with about nine stations.

They had planned to take their idea to the radio station manager and ask to use something called the sub-carrier frequency on the FM station’s antenna to distribute the programs.  The frequency was not something people got on the regular radios but was sometimes used to distribute elevator music to department stores or offices through special receivers.  You have to be kind of along in years to remember hearing that music while you shopped or, uh, rode the elevator.    But the manager got wind of their network idea before they could meet with him and he summoned Clyde one night to a meeting under a street light near both of their homes and in the ensuing heated discussion announce he was going to fire Derry Brownfield.

Which he did.

Which was the best thing that could have happened to The Missouri Network, Inc., as the company began.  It meant that the network would be completely independent of the programming demands of any particular radio station and would have to arrange hard-wire connections with affiliates.  That worked until technology made it possible for us to eliminate the expensive telephone line hookups with stations and became the first radio network anywhere in American that was 100% satellite-delivered.

The concept worked really well and about a year or so after the network began on January 2, 1973, Clyde and Derry decided the cash flow was good enough to pay their salaries, make payments on the loans, and start the news network.

So Clyde called me. We met. He offered me a job.

And I put him off because I had been the capitol correspondent for KMOX in St. Louis (an impressive title that amounted to little more than doing a sixty-second wrapup piece about what had happened in Jefferson City during the week. It was broadcast on a Saturday morning show in St. Louis.   KMOX’s general manager and broadcasting god Bob Hyland had told me a few months earlier that the station was impressed by my work and wanted to “bring me in” as soon as there was an opening.   I later learned I was not the first person he said that to and by the time Clyde called me I was about to give up on the dream of working for CBS in St. Louis.  Finally it was clear that wasn’t going to happen so I told Clyde I’d work for him.

I was going to stay with the station through the November elections but the manager, upon learning I was going to be the fourth person from the station to work for the network, told me that I should consider October 31 my last day.

So on November 1, 1974, I started helping Clyde make his dream of a news network come true.  We would debut on January 2, 1975.  Two other reporters would be the first staff members.  Jeff Smith, who had worked with me at the radio station before he went to more lucrative pastures, was the first choice.   And shortly after that we got an application and an audition tape from a young man in Albuquerque named Charles Morris.  They were extraordinary reporters and even more extraordinary people.

I think the addition of the three of us raised the total company employment to eight.

We started working together on December 1, 1974.  One of our first jobs was to move the furniture in to the first studios, a two-room efficiency apartment on the top floor of a former funeral home at 216 E. McCarty.  KWOS was on the bottom floor (I think the employee kitchen was in the former embalming room).   Our offices were in the apartment that was used by families of the recently-departed who needed a place to stay for a few days.

Gray metal desks, heavy and ungainly, were among the first things we moved in.  We had to hoist those suckers up a narrow stairway, make a little jog to the left and then another one to the right and fit the desks through a standard-sized (narrow) door opening.  That was the easy part.

The desk for the studio was a former wood, u-shaped circulation desk from the old city library that we wrestled with for an entire day and finally took apart, even breaking glue joints, to get it inside the office.   The whole day!  We were exhausted when we called it a day.  But it made for an impressive operations center for the network.

And on January 2, 1975 we went on the air with a congratulatory greeting from Governor Bond and some stories about Missourians (and Americans) being allowed to own gold coins for the first time in about four decades. Somewhere we have recordings of the first newscasts.

Not long afterwards, the Missouri Network, Inc., changed its name.  The farm network had signed up its first affiliates outside the state so it needed a name that didn’t have “Missouri” in it.  That’s when it became the Brownfield Network.  And later, Missouri Network, Inc., became inadequate.  We had a staff meeting at the corporate headquarters across the street at 217 (now a law office) and somebody suggested the company get a name that recognized the founders. And that’s how Learfield was born.

By then, Charles Morris was gone. I think by then he was working for United Press International and later was an owner of an Oklahoma radio station. Jeff Smith had become a part of the company sales force and became General Manager of the Missourinet.  He later became the President and COO  of the Minnesota News Network (which Learfield later bought) and moved on to become a communications director for Northwest Airlines before it disappeared into Delta in 2008. He can still fly free, although on standby, with Delta and now is the Communications Director for Volunteers of America of Minnesota and Wisconsin, one of the country’s largest health and human services organizations.

Charles, who often came into the newsroom toting the latest book on positive thinking by the televangelist and motivational speaker Rev. Robert Schuller, later went to seminary and is the president of California-based Haven Ministries, Inc., a radio ministry that began in 1934.

Both were invited to the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame induction in June of the guy who brought them to the Missourinet so we could together provide Missourians with political and government news they never before had a chance to hear. Neither Jeff nor Chuck could make it. But schedules seemed to match up for the visit this week.

We started something good.  We made Clyde’s dream come true.  And now the four of us—Clyde, Jeff, Chuck, and me—are together again.   We’ve been telling stories, recalling people we dealt with all those years ago, remembering how we provided a product that Clyde and our friend Jim Lipsey—another colleague at that Jefferson City radio station—could convince stations to take (we started with 36 affiliates, most of which were farm network affiliated stations that had learned the company could be trusted).

And we’re finally getting our picture taken together.

We were blessed by the opportunity we had to start something good.  We were blessed by working for Clyde.  We were blessed because we were able to work with each other.

We visited today’s Learfield building where Jeff and Chuck were amazed by the empire the company has grown to from the days when we were employees 6-7-8, setting out to change the way Missourians got news about their state government and politics.  Only one person working in the building has been around long enough to remember us. Afterwards we went back downtown to the Missouri Bar Annex, the former ex-funeral home where we visited our original newsroom and studio.  They are now divided into two offices.

News and Ag broadcasting are just a small part of Learfield Communications today, a billion-dollar-plus enterprise that Clyde and I sometimes visit although more and more people wonder who we are. A lot of people work for Learfield now.  There are offices throughout the nation.  But once there were eight of us in two buildings.  And we were three of them.  We were The Missourinet.

(That Chuck on the far left, Jeff, me, and Clyde having a good time in today’s Missourinet newsroom.)

We still look enough like we did all those years ago that we didn’t have any trouble recognizing each other.  It was a special time back in the mid and late 1970s when we started the Missourinet.  It was a REALLY special time, those 21 hours we had together more than four decades later.

 

I’ve reported about fakes but I’ve never done fake news

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Some friends think I should post a little speech I gave last month at the Missouri Broadcasters Association Convention.  The MBA has paid your faithful scribe its highest compliment by making me the first news director in its Hall of Fame.

Understand that a lot of people worked with me to report the news on the Missourinet for forty years.  And several helped me develop whatever talent I possess that let me be a reporter, which I think is about the greatest job in the world.  To spend a lifetime on the front line of events that affect the way all of us live and being paid to tell others about those things—well, I can’t think of anything I would rather have done. And it’s something I decided I wanted to do in the fourth or fifth grade.

Here’s the speech that several people say they liked (I deviated from the script from time to time):

Thank you for this recognition of a life’s efforts that have been achieved with the hard work, inspiration, support, cooperation, and—at times—the protection of many, many others.

Dr. Ed Lambert was my first broadcast professor at the University of Missouri, and Mahlon Aldridge of KFRU was my first general manager, a man who let many young people find out if they really wanted to be in this business by working at the radio station there. And Ray Rouse, who put me on the air for my first newscast in February of 1963.  And then there’s Clyde, who has been such a good friend for a long time.

These are people who taught me and who exemplified for me the very concept that radio should be of a community, not just in a community. They taught me these things and I continue to carry those thoughts and ideas—and ideals—through my life.

They taught me that the words in the old phrase, “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” especially the last word, are vitally important and should be important to radio. They speak of an obligation beyond ourselves and our bottom lines.

I want to single out one person worthy of great gratitude from me—-and probably great sympathy from all of you:

My wife, Nancy, has tolerated a husband whose work week usually reached 70 or 80 hours, who sometimes brought dinner to me at the Capitol in a covered plate.  She now knows the challenges of having me in the house at lunch time. We are dealing with that crisis one day at a time.

In forty years at the Missourinet we had a lot of outstanding reporters in an aggressive newsroom that could not be intimidated, or bought, or persuaded to ignore issues and people who deserved the spotlight. We were protected by the founder of our company, Clyde Lear, himself a journalist who understood the importance of a free, unafraid, press, and the necessity in a free society of an informed public—informed by that free and responsible press.

Long ago, while a student being shaped as a Journalist at the University of Missouri, I first heard the words of Walter Williams, the founder of the world’s first School of Journalism, who wrote, “I believe in the profession of Journalism.  I believe that the public journal is a public trust, that all connected with it are to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is betrayal of this trust.”

Those words were the touchstones of our Missourinet newsroom and they are the unspoken aims of free journalists everywhere. Unfortunately, they seem to mean much less to many of those who control our stations today.

I had The Journalist’s Creed translated into the Romanian and Polish languages when I was sent to those countries to run seminars on developing independent news operations after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And I distributed those words to the young, idealistic journalists who were then starting to emerge in those now, free, countries.

This is a good time, I think, for the first news director in your Hall of Fame to make a very strong point or two—and in doing so I hope not to be considered ungrateful for this honor.

In my half-century plus as a journalist first—a broadcast journalist, second—I have never—ever—-broadcast “fake news.” The Missourinet never once did “fake news.” We worked with hundreds of news people at dozens of stations throughout Missouri, some of whom are in this room tonight, and not once did any of them ever give us a story that was “fake news.”

Those who accuse people like me of doing fake news are accusing people like me of being liars.  I don’t lie.  We didn’t lie. The Missourinet today doesn’t lie. And our affiliate news people who fed us thousands of stories never lied.

When it comes to integrity, I will stack the people I worked with in my newsroom or people in the newsrooms throughout the state that we worked with against the claimed integrity of those seeking or holding positions of power any day of the week on any standard of integrity.

It might seem to some that those who accuse people in my profession of doing “fake news” are only painting the national news organizations with that brush. But there is a splatter that taints all journalists, and I do not believe it is unintentional.

My good friend Dan Shelley, who has gone from sending us stories from KTTS in Springfield to being the Executive Director of the Radio Television Digital News Association, recently observed that, “In today’s divisive, vitriolic environment, journalists should watch their backs but not back down. The only antidote to attacks on responsible journalism is more and better journalism.”

So let me put it plainly: Wherever in our industry there is fake news, it is not likely to be in newsrooms that are free from political, economic, and corporate pressure.  But to the misfortune of our communities, to our state, and to our nation, our increasingly corporate-dominated industry has—in too many places—eliminated that independent, local, voice entirely—has reduced it to insignificance, or has turned the independent local news departments into corporate mouthpieces.

It might be argued—perhaps SHOULD be argued—that our industry is complicit in undermining the work of the shrinking number of people in our newsrooms because of the constant and badly imbalanced drum beat of division, derision, denigration, and distrust that goes forth on our airwaves hour after hour, convincing people they are victims of—rather than partners in—the American system of government..

In effect, we splatter ourselves, and in doing so, we do a disservice to the people of integrity— the reporters, news directors, and editors, the photojournalists in whose programs candidates and special interests might buy time but should never control content. , and in those stories that are insulated from those who seek to make journalists only their partisan public relations tools.

This is a time for all of us to find courage, the courage to build public trust in ourselves by taking more seriously our roles as trustees of for the public, and being more of a “necessity” than the furniture store in the next block, the clothing store at the mall, the  yogurt shop up the street.

It is time for less manipulative talk, and time for a commitment to more significant news that helps our public think for itself.

I am intensely grateful to the Missouri Broadcasters Association for this wonderful recognition. What I have said tonight is what I have been and what I still am, and the hopes I have that our industry can be more of a necessity for more people than that furniture store in the next block.

It is a great honor to be in company with so many people for whom I have such great regard.  Thank you for this recognition.

If reading these remarks is not enough for you, you can watch them being delivered (with some additional material ad-libbed and some nice things others said—including from the first two reporters we hired at the network, Jeff Smith and Charles Morris) at https://www.mbaweb.org/bob-priddy/.  It is nice of people to say those things while I’m still on the green side of the grass.  I think we could do a better job of saying things like these to each other before they are said around a box while soft organ music is playing.

The reference to “public interest, convenience and necessity” originally was in the federal public utility law and was written into the Federal Radio Act of 1927, the first law setting operational standards for the new medium of radio. It was carried over into the 1934 Federal Communications Act.  There are those who think the phrase, often criticized for vagueness, became a dead phrase after deregulation of broadcasting in the Reagan years.  I believe it called for a certain amount of industry responsibility that is lacking today.

One of the lines I had in the speech that I left out was “I have never done fake news but I have done news about fakes.”   This event was held on June 2 and I thought it best to leave some things unsaid that would otherwise have diverted attention from the points of the speech.

So there it is.  Some people stood up and clapped afterwards.  That was pretty nice.

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Still Radio

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I sat down at my computer early one morning when this came in that twilight between sleep and wakefulness. It has been polished a little in the days since.

I wrote my first story for a radio newscast in the fall of 1962 and I voiced my first newscast at 11:55 p.m. in January or February of 1963. I had been taught by, among others, a professor who is in the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame, Dr. Edward C. Lambert, the founder of the broadcast journalism sequence at the University of Missouri. My first station manager is in the Hall of Fame, Mahlon Aldridge, of KFRU in Columbia. I was introduced for the newscast by an announcer who is a member of the Hall of Fame, Ray Rouse. Sometimes at my first station I filled in on sportscasts for Larry Zimmer, whose long career as announcer for the Colorado Buffalos and Denver Broncos football games put him in the Colorado equivalent of the MBA Hall.

For eleven years I was a voice in Columbia, then Jefferson City and for more than forty years I have been a voice throughout a state and at times a voice in other parts of the nation and the world, the supervisor and then an employee of another member of the Hall of Fame, Clyde Lear.  Even today, retired from the daily pressure cooker of a radio newsroom, I remain a participant in the medium, a contributing editor to The Missourinet. The two stations where I learned that radio would be my life are now just two formats in a building in Columbia. One of those stations used to operate in Jefferson City but is now just another property in a mega-radio conglomerate.

I have one of the great old upright radios in the library in my basement.  I turned it on once many years ago just after I got it and have not turned it on since because what comes out of it today does not go with that radio. I despair sometimes for the medium and I fear for our nation when the federal body regulating broadcasting continues to move to kill the diversity of voices in our communities in television as well as in radio.

There once was magic in the boxes that can pull ghosts out of the sky (as the play “Voice of the Prairie” puts it) and there still is, but in too few places.  Let us hope for a re-birth, somehow, of that magic.

 

I am Radio

I am the voice in the morning

In cities large and small,

In the country, high and low,

Telling you to dress for hot or cold, wet or dry.

I am the voice that is the neighbor you cannot see,

The friend you never meet,

Telling you important things:

Where the traffic is,

Where the detours are,

What the city council did,

What the school board intends,

When the civic club peanut sale is.

What the hot lunch is at school

Or the senior center.

I am the one you take to the basement

when the tornado sirens blow,

the trusted,

always present voice,

the voice of danger and of safety.

I am radio.

I am the one that tells you

What the high school team did last night,

What the major league team did;

The NFL, NHL, the NBA did.

I tell you the about the world—

What’s happening inside the beltway,

In space over our heads,

Across the Atlantic,

Along the Pacific Rim,

The Mediterranean coast,

In the sands of deserts

the damps of the tropical forests,

and your own back yard.

I am radio,

the image-maker

The words and the sounds

That let you see in your own mind

places and events—

the green of a diamond

and the white of its base paths,

The soaring arc of the ball headed for the crowd,

The hardwood floor,

the net that snaps as the ball goes through,

The chilly grass marked by yard lines,

the sounds of struggle and impact

and movement left to right on the dial.

I am the sound of sharpened metal on ice,

The crack of the puck off the stick.

As well as the rattle of gunfire in a besieged city,

Grief and joy,

The maraschino cherry

landing on a mountain of whipped cream

floating in a Lake Michigan filled with hot chocolate.

I am radio.

I am direction.

I am “Down the stretch they come!”

The market is up.

The politician who reaches across the aisle.

I am mathematics.

“40, 30, 20, 10, Touchdown!”

I am drama.

“Yesssss!” and “He SCORES!!!”

I am “Suspense,”

And “Inner Sanctum”

And warnings of war.

I am the voice of democracy and decency,

The voices of your town

Preaching the message

Sharing recipes,

Selling things on the trading post

Expressing opinions.

I am your voice.

I am radio

I am the past.

The Harding-Cox election returns,

Vincent Lopez

The A&P Gypsies

The velvet voice of Vaughn DeLeath

Paul Whiteman

Amos & Andy,

Lum ‘n’ Abner,

Fibber and Molly.

I am Charlie, the ventriloquist’s friend.

I am horror.

“Oh, the Humanity!”

Or “Now is a good time to switch off the radio,

for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.”

“President Kennedy is dead.”

And I am hope:

“The only thing we have to fear,

is fear itself.”

“I have a dream.”

“That’s one small step for a man,

one giant leap for mankind.”

I was born of a desire to bring

The city to the country.

I remain the voice of the farmer,

The teller of market prices,

The forecaster of crops.

I am the Dow Jones numbers,

The reporter of prosperity

And collapse,

Of city crime

And rural struggle.

I am radio.

I am imagination.

Lake Woebegone, Minnesota,

where it’s always a quiet week.

Pine Ridge, Arkansas,

where the Jot ‘em Down Store was the place to be.

Grinder’s Switch,

where there was a lady greeter who said,

“How-DEEE!”

Metropolis, Gotham, Summerfield,

Rushville Center, Town Hall Tonight,

and a Dodge City that never was.

My places and my people are what your mind

Shows you they are.

I am heroes—

The Lone Ranger

The Green Hornet

The correspondent under fire

on the front line,

The reporter who will not be intimidated

in the political arena.

I am the villain—

The demagogue and the dictator

The manipulator and the huckster

Selling snake oil

In potions and politics.

Goat glands, Sal Hepatica and Ipana

Healing cloths and Hadacol,

Simple solutions

To complex world problems.

I am radio.

In places I am homogenized,

No longer OF a community,

but just IN a community,

not a station,

but just another format

in a building full of formats.

Some say I lost my soul when

towns became “Markets, “

When stations became only “properties,”

and when the neighbors on the air

talking to us about us

became strangers on the satellite

talking of division and distrust.

When corporate profits

Snuffed out community service

And killed the diversity of voices.

And in too many places, they are correct.

But in some places my heart remains strong,

There, I am still your neighbor,

Still the one who tells you the weather,

Let’s you hear the high school games,

Who tells you of the council, the school board,

The county fair, and the peanut sale.

I have been written off,

Pronounced dead,

Outmoded,

Old-fashioned,

Immaterial,

Uncompetitive,

Low-tech.

But I have not gone away.

I have not died.

I have reinvented,

Reinvigorated,

Restored myself.

Who knows what I am to become?

I remain

The voice in your bedroom,

information in your bathroom,

news at your breakfast table,

a companion in your car.

From midnight to midnight.

I remain.

I am radio.

Sport

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We have reached the time of year when we face crises galore, when many people become passionate about trivial events, when one’s emotions are strained, where hard feelings are generated and superiority is established, when detailed analysis of events dominates much of the public discussion and arguments—even fisticuffs—are motivated by events that in reality have only passing impact on our daily lives.

It’s World Series time in baseball. College football fans are starting to evaluate the value of life on the basis of bowl eligibility.  Pro football fans bemoan the one misplay that dooms the home team or keeps a Super Bowl dream alive.  Pro basketball and hockey fans already are agonizing over or exulting about the puck or the ball that barely missed the net—or got into it at the last second.   College basketball fans soon will cheer the home team in its quest for the post-season or demonstrate their hate for a traditional rival.  In fact, Missouri has (be still my beating heart!) played Kansas in a basketball game!

This is the time of year when games don’t end when the clock or the innings or the quarters run out.  It’s a time when we forget these are only games that have their most meaning during the time they are played. The world will not be more peaceful and safe because they were played.  Homeless people will still live in boxes or in doorways.  Children will still starve and die in desperate circumstances.

We were reminded of those sentiments recently when we re-discovered one of our favorite sports books that puts all of this in perspective.   It’s Heywood Hale Broun’s Tumultuous Merriment, which came out in 1979, a memoir of the decade he spent as a “color commentator” for CBS Sports.  A better word probably is “essayist.”   He was, in our memory, the sports counterpart to Charles Kuralt, the other CBS correspondent on the road. He was the fellow with the great moustache and the colorful sport coat who always saw sports with more perceptive eyes that did not focus on the final outcome.

If you remember him and/or you have some qualms about the value of sports in general and big-time sport in particular, you might want to search out a copy of this book.

Broun began his book with a definition of “sport” from Samuel Johnson’s eighteen-century dictionary: Play; diversion; games; frolick and tumultuous merriment and then asks, “Who now, save an occasional small child, regards sport as diversion or as tumultuous merriment? How much frolick is there in the Ohio State-Michigan game, the modern Olympics, the Little League championship of a crossroads country town?”

He says it is “somber tosh” to explain play as a way to serve wish-fulfillment, or a way to work off hostility, or a way to burn off excess energy, or something that “builds character, creates a healthy moral climate, builds bonds of fellowship, and gives a chance to earn big money with the pros.”

Coaches, he wrote, dare not admit they are just teaching a diversion.  To avoid being paid like English professors, they must “pose as saviors of youth, muscular alchemists who can take the base metal of bad boys and produce golden lads, saints who can block and shoot baskets.”

“It is to our discredit that we swallow all this stuff,” he wrote.  And he had no patience with those who cited the Duke of Wellington’s contention that the Battle of Waterloo had been won  on the playing fields of Eton.  Better, he argued, to remember what the Duke said as he watched troops whose preparation for war had consisted of playing rugby and cricket: “I don’t know if they frighten Napoleon, but by God, they frighten me!”

Broun charges our games “ruthlessly” root fun out of our games “lest it soften our fiber.”  But he says fun need not disappear as the stakes increase and tension grows.  After all, he says, our games are not open heart surgery—where there is real tension and the stakes are really high.

“We are only grotesque when we apply the standards suitable to the gladiator to our Little League children,” he wrote. “It is unfair to make them the surrogates of our flab-shackled daydreams.”

He did not begrudge the high salaries paid to the professionals by the corporations that own their teams but he finds the talk of money turns the athlete and his agent into dullards and he wonders why he even cares whether they win or lose.   Broun said he could get the same kind of behavior at a sales convention.

“After all, one game is not really more important than another in the cosmic scheme of things,” he wrote. “But it’s wonderful fun to pretend and we all have expended a lot of pretense on the Super Bowls, the World Series, the Triple Crown and football games like Yale-Harvard, Oho State-Michigan, or Texas-Oklahoma.”

Broun notes that “small children, more than their elders, demand a structure of immutable rules in their games” regardless of where the games are played. The rules are made up to fit the circumstances, but the rules must be followed.  And that, he says, is why we are fascinated by games. “They are the only activities of life where the rules are, metaphorically or actually, written on the top of the box.”  Life, on the other hand, is a place where the rules quickly can change for a participant, which is why we find relief to “escape into the small, known, well-defined structure of a game.”

“We agree, for the time we play it at least, to its importance, and everything else is lost in the shadows behind the sidelines,” he wrote.  Cheating only thrusts the participant back into the uncertainty of the real world.  “If winning is overwhelmingly important, and is the only reason for playing, we must break the ‘rule’ if no one is looking, or bend it if someone is.”

Broun discovered a game that he thought represented the purity that “sport” in its truest form should be while covering a story at the D. D. Palmer College of Chiropracty in Davenport, Iowa: Rugby.  Perhaps, he reasoned, the game’s lack of the “war game precision” of football that left spectators unable to have strategic discussions about why a team won or lost, and who was responsible, is why rugby has never caught on here. “What rugby does provide,” he wrote, “is an immense amount of pleasure to its players…The air is always filled with fiercely happy cries as the packed scrum into which the ball is dropped dissolves into a thirty-man whirlpool.

“For all the talk of American coaches about team effort, it is possible in sports like football and baseball to put the blame for a loss on an individual, the man who struck out with the bases loaded, dropped a fly ball in the ninth, couldn’t hold a pass, missed a crucial kick. In true team sports like rugby this finger-pointing is a lot more difficult, which is why I found the players at Palmer, scab-nosed to a man, full of good cheer after bashing about on a cold and muddy day.”

He reminds us:

“The actual importance of the contest is immaterial to both spectators and players once the period of magic has begun.  The level of excitement is subconsciously chosen by those present and after a time exists beyond their control…All of us should play as if life and honor depended on it, and all of us should cheer as if it were Lucifer State versus Angel U. in the arena; but at game’s end all of us should recognize that paradise was neither won nor lost. None of us should emulate those middle-aged men who stare glumly into the bottom of a highball glass when they think of a shot that failed to drop in the last second of some long-ago basketball game…

“Let it not be said, although I’m afraid it will, that young men are preparing for a stern world where mistakes are not forgotten, and that they should have a stern preparation for that world.

“Sport is a preparation for more sport and not a businessmen’s ROTC…You can’t tackle economics or block logistics.

“Boys and girls, men and women, can all be distorted by the philosophies that use games to grotesque ends…A coach is not a priest. Games are not life. There is no authority save the Rule, which all players have agreed on, and there is no fun like playing a game for the sake of a game.”

Broun died in 2001.  He was 83.

We’re not sure if his words are any more useful or meaningful in shaping the world of sport and the public’s attitude toward it today than they were in 1979.  Or even whether there is some wisdom in them for the game of politics.

But then again, “There is no authority save the Rule,” and we risk a lot when we decide on or off the playing field that The Rule is expendable.

(Photo credits: paulikreport.com)

Heywood Hale Broun, Tumultuous Merriment, New York, Richard Marek Publishers, 1979

Journalism I

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It’s not as if we haven’t been called names before. It’s not the first time that those in power wish reporters weren’t telling people what they’re really up to.  Or thinking about.

Criticisms or attacks from those who wish we weren’t so bothersome to them are not new nor will they ever go away. And what they say about us is sometimes not nearly so scathing as some of the things we say about ourselves.

We have accumulated through the years some of the noble things said about our profession and some of the criticisms leveled at it, internally and externally.  From time to time we will share them with you because we know that journalists have responsibilities and obligations of which they need at times to be reminded. We live in a world of kicks in the butt and occasional pats on the head and we are glad to toil in a nation that allows, if not encourages, both.  Here is a sample of the things said about those of us who do a job that is essential, regardless of whether you agree with what we say and write.

“Controversy? You can’t be any kind of reporter worthy of the name and avoid controversy completely. You can’t be a good reporter and not be fairly regularly involved in some kind of controversy. And I don’t think you can be a great reporter and avoid controversy very often, because one of the roles a good journalist plays is to tell the tough truths as well as the easy truths. And the tough truths will lead you to controversy, and even a search for the tough truths will cost you something. Please don’t make this play or read as any complaint, it’s trying to explain this goes with the territory if you’re a journalist of integrity. That if you start out a journalist or if you reach a point in journalism where you say, ‘Listen, I’m just not going not touch anything that could possibly be controversial,’ then you ought to get out.”

—Dan Rather, Staff, May 5, 2001

“If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.”

—Norman Mailer, The Snark Handbook

“I believe in the profession of journalism. I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is betrayal of this trust. I believe that clear thinking and clear statement, accuracy and fairness are fundamental to good journalism. I believe that a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to be true.”

—Walter Williams, founder of the nation’s first School of Journalism at the University of Missouri (1908), The Journalist’s Creed (partial)

“Journalism is unlike any other craft. It most closely resembles show business. There’s an undeniable element of ego in journalism, and an equally undeniable element of self-sacrifice. Performers know the show must go on. Journalists know the paper has to come out on time.”

—Donald L. Ferguson, Opportunities in Journalism Careers

“It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles.”

—G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

“There is a line I would often share when I was a newspaper reporter talking to people who complained that we only reported ‘bad news.’ I would tell them: ‘It’s not news when a plane lands safely.’ And it’s not. ‘Everybody lived happily ever after’ is a great ending, but if they lived happily the whole time you wouldn’t bother reading.”

—Rick Polito, newhope360, January 20, 2016

 

“There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism.  By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891.

Citizens do not think through the meaning of a free press.  Too many regard it merely as a profitable privilege of publishers, instead of the right of all the people and the chief institution of representative government.  A free press is that privilege of citizenship which makes governmental dictatorship impossible.  When editors fight for the liberty to speak and write, they fight for the greatest of all human rights under government.  He is not thoughtful who cannot see that democracy cannot exist except through the maintenance of a channel through which information can flow freely from the center of government to all the people and through which praise and criticism can flow freely from the people to the center.

—American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1938

So the journalist, the reporter, flourishes in this climate of scorn and principle. And your correspondent cannot think of anything he would rather be doing with his life than living in that climate.

We’ll let you inside that climate from time to time in the future.

 

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Dogs and a frog; life after journalism

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Drew Vogel was one of the Missourinet reporters who bedeviled Governor Teasdale throughout his four years in office.  We’ve kept in touch through the years.  Drew has been a nursing home administrator in Ohio for a long, long time.  He recently told me, “When I quit doing news I didn’t miss being on the radio, or reporting; what I missed was the creative high I get from writing.”

Most of Drew’s creativity is spread among Facebook friends—your friendly correspondent doesn’t do Facebook, claiming he has a life to live.  Here’s something Drew recently wrote that will bring back some memories to most of the demographic that stumbles over these entries:

Guess what year this is.

The South Tower of the World Trade Center is topped out.  Richard Nixon announces he will become the first U.S. president to visit China. Jeff Gordon is born. Coco Chanel dies.

Army Lieutenant William Calley is sentenced to life in prison for the My Lai Massacre.  Amtrak begins. Nikita Khruschev and James Cash (JC) Penney die. Justin Trudeau is born. 

Charles Manson and his “family” are sentenced to death for the Tate-La Bianca murders. Apollo 14 and 15 make moon landings. Snoop Dog and Kid Rock are born. Duane Allman dies. 

The Attica Prison riot breaks out in New York. Evel Knievel sets a world record by jumping over 19 cars on his motorcycle. Bobby Jones and Audie Murphy die. Pete Sampras is born.

The New York Times publishes the Pentagon Papers. Walt Disney World opens in Florida. Lance Armstrong is born. Louis Armstrong dies.And “JEREMIAH WAS A BULLFROG!”

The year was 1971.

We witnessed Three Dog Night in concert at the Taft Theatre in Cincinnati last night.

I’ve seen acts at the Taft over the years—Phantom of the Opera, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton when she was still with Porter Waggoner, George Carlin and a great bluegrass show featuring Jim and Jesse and the Osborn Brothers.

I introduced a number of country acts at the Taft when I was a disk jockey. But this was my first rock concert there.

Three Dog Night?

They were really pretty good.

OK, I’m from that era, but they really can still rock, even though the original members are approaching three-quarters of a century in age.

Two of the founders are still in the band. Lead guitar Michael Allsup is 70. Lead singer Danny Hutton will be 75 soon. 

Three of the original seven have gone to that big recording studio in the sky. 

…he was a good friend of mine

I never understood a single word he said

But I helped him drink his wine.

If you are a person less than a certain age, you may not be familiar with the history of Three Dog Night, but you probably have heard its music.

There’s Jeremiah—the song is actually called “Joy to the World.”  “One.”  “I’ve never been to Spain.”  “Eli’s Coming.”  “Celebrate.” “Just an Old Fashioned Love Song.”

Good stuff, even today. And they did all their hits last night. All of them.  They’ve had so many they don’t have to go outside their playbook. 

Between 1969 and 1975 the band had an amazing 21 records on the Billboard Magazine Top 40. “Joy to the World” turned gold two months after it was released and ultimately sold five million copies.

“Black and White” and “Mama Told Me” reached #1 as well.

Neither Credence Clearwater Revival, nor the Eagles, comparable groups of the era, had a #1 during that time and both had fewer appearances in the Top 40.

In fact, the Beatles only had five songs in the Top 40 from 1969 to ’75 but they had disbanded in 1970.  Elvis only had 14 Top 40 appearances and one #1 in that timeframe.

And he always had

Some mighty fine wine.

When we entered the Taft, the usher asked if we would be drinking any alcohol. Gail said no. I said I might have a glass of wine. She stamped my hand.  Didn’t ask for ID, not that I expected to be carded, but she did tamp my hand. 

Strange, very strange.

The crowd was largely people who had been teenaged-to-young adults when Three Dog Night songs were hits. In other words, 60 and 70-something folks like Gail and me.

However, they were a tech savvy bunch. Instead of “flick the Bic” on romantic songs, they used the flashlights on their Androids.

Thank goodness, no one showed up dressed in “period costume.”  No bell bottoms or Roman sandals.

I did see one guy who looked a lot like John Gotti. The Teflon Don was of that era. You don’t suppose he slipped away again, do you?

If I were the king of the world,

Tell you what I’d do.

I’d throw away the cars and the bars and the wars.

And make sweet love to you.

Oh, I did see a couple of tie-dyed T-shirts that covered bulging bellies. The Guys’ hair was mostly short—what there was of it.

One or two fellows had long-enough-to-be-ponytailed locks, but with bare skin topping off the doo, it amounted to a Friar tuck-goes-hippie kind of a look.

You know I love the ladies.

Love to have my fun

I’m a high life flyer and rainbow rider.

A straight shootin’ son-of-a-gun.

The ladies had hair issues, too. It was either white or dyed so it wouldn’t be white. More than a few were in the size 18-22 category.

Joy to the world

All the boys and girls

There actually were a few boys and girls—young people likely brought by their grandparents. 

But, not many.

If you herded all of them together I doubt there would have been enough to fill up a 1962 psychedelic-painted peace sign=embroidered VW bus.

Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea

Joy to you and me.

So, what about Jeremiah?   You’ll be happy to know that he didn’t croak.

He didn’t donate his legs to a garlic and butter-filled skillet.

In fact, he was the encore finale.

When the keyboard hit the first few notes of Joy, the crowd—those who still could—jumped to its collective, orthopedic-clad feet and loudly sang along with the boys.

Forty-six years after Jeremiah made the scene, he still brings Joy to the world.

 

Signs of our times

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Two geezers were having lunch the other day at a local restaurant/craft beer emporium and the conversation turned to the Five Man Electrical Band.   Right away, you know these two brilliant conversationalists had to be geezers because they immediately remembered the group’s biggest hit, Signs, which reached number three on the Billboard chart in 1971.

Metrolyrics has this version of the lyrics (which we are using because it cleaned up one line):

And the sign said “Long-haired freaky people need not apply” So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why He said “You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you’ll do” So I took off my hat, I said “Imagine that. Huh! Me workin’ for you!” Whoa-oh-oh

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

And the sign said anybody caught trespassin’ would be shot on sight So I jumped on the fence and-a yelled at the house “Hey! What gives you the right?” “To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in” “If God was here he’d tell you to your face, man, you’re some kinda sinner”

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

Now, hey you, mister, can’t you read? You’ve got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat You can’t even watch, no you can’t eat You ain’t supposed to be here The sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside Ugh

And the sign said, “Everybody welcome. Come in, kneel down and pray” But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all I didn’t have a penny to pay So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign I said, “Thank you, Lord, for thinkin’ ’bout me. I’m alive and doin’ fine” Woo

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Five Man Electrical Band—uh—disbanded (add that to the list of old jokes such as “Old doctors never die, they just lose their patients,” and other puns about the ends of careers) in 1975, so you know that these two guys still without hearing aids but still WITH most of their teeth, quit being young in every place but their own minds a long time ago.

One geezer hauled out his pocket encyclopedia/camera, a device usually marketed as a telephone but which he seldom uses that way, and showed the other geezer a picture he took of a sign at a tourist junk shop in Limon, Colorado a few days earlier and suggested there are many venues where this sign should be posted:

Both geezers reflect that the sign is highly reminiscent of the four-way test of the civic organization, Rotary International, which is:

Is it TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

But then, Geezer one did the two-fingery thing on the encyclopedia/camera screen to widen out the image to show two other signs on either side of the “Think” sign.  The expanded image seems to capture the contradictions in our social dialogue, which too often take the shape of individual diaTRIBE.

To save you the trouble of doing your own two-fingery thing to expand the image, we’ll tell you that the sign on the left says, “If you can read this you are in range,” and shows an apparent double-barreled shotgun, and the sign on the right says “The average response time of a 911 call is 23 minutes. The response time of a .357 is 1400 feet per second.”

The other two signs might be true and helpful—somehow. We suspect they are seldom necessary. They aren’t real inspiring except in a pretty anti-social sort of a way.  And forget about kindness.  But in years to come they will provide fodder for sociologists, psychiatrists and other “ists” studying the American mind in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries.

Geezer One saw another sign a few days earlier at Dot’s Diner, a sandwich place in Nederland, Colorado—a few miles above Boulder—where the proprietors think the music of the Grateful Dead is appropriate background for a meal.  The sign wasn’t mean or threatening.  It just asked people to respect other diners who were having their sandwich with a Touch of Grey, or their omelet with Sugar Magnolia.

Maybe Geezer One was just feeling mellow during his lunch because he’d just ridden a pig on the 1909 restored carousel that is Nederland’s biggest attraction.  A fellow named Scott Harrison had rescued the carousel from the scrap heap and had spent more than twenty-five years carving all of the creatures for it.  The Carousel of Joy, it’s called.  And you are NOT too old to enjoy riding it and listening to the original Wurlitzer mechanical band organ as you go.

—

The discussion reminded one of the geezers of the kindly little signs that vanished from our roads about the time the interstate highway system came along.  The last Burma-Shave signs went up in 1963.  You might find a few in museums here and there today.  Some thought they were distractions to drivers and made the two-lane roads they populated less safe.  But now in these days with the pleas for drivers to ignore the distractions of Facebook, or Twitter, or the telephone itself—-at the same time that cars all have video screens in the middle of the dash loaded with all kinds of information—the concerns about Burma-Shave signs seem mild.

Some of the signs, in fact, promoted highway safety.  Frank Rowsome, Jr., put out a little book in 1965 that contained all of those messages, The Verse By the Side of the Road.  It has all of them, including the first ones in 1927. All had the company name at the end of each series and most promoted using the product when you were shaving with a blade.  But some were highway safety messages:

Don’t Lose/Your Head/To Gain a Minute/You Need Your Head/Your Brains Are In It

Or:

Dim Your Lights/Behind A Car/Let Folks See/How Bright You Are.

Then there was:

Thirty Days/Hath September/April/June And The/Speed Offender 

Would signs like those do as much good, or more good, on our highways than the electric signs telling us how many fatalities we’ve had each month, or reminding us to buckle up?   Or maybe they’d make some good light-hearted but meaningful reminders.  And monotony-breaking moments on the crowded, straight-as-a-string interstates.

Perhaps something such as:

Buckle Up/Don’t Be Silly/Don’t Be Under/A Stone With/ ACarved Lilly/MODOT.

If you have some Burma-Shave inspired signs that you think would be useful for MODOT, or that would meet the four-way test for general civil discussion, send them along in the “comments” section below.  If they meet our standards of civility (as we outline on this page) we’ll post them.  And then you can tell your friends YOU are a published poet!  A Roadside Laureate!

(Burma Shave sign image by G. D. Carrington)