Last Christmas, Karen gave me a set of speakers, including a sub-woofer, for my computer. We hooked them up and I didn't know what to do with them. It wasn't until March, or April, that I discovered what I had.
Then one day, in my work, it became necessary for me to listen to Luciano Pavarotti's famed "Nessun Dorma" aria. We have a Pavarotti CD in the house, and I was girding my loins to look for it when I thought about YouTube. I knew about YouTube and understood it as a site where people with a lot of time on their hands created and posted videos for the general amusement of a very small demographic. Little did I know.
I think it was a Google search for "Nessun Dorma" that took me to YouTube. There was a selection, and I clicked on the one at the very top, that had the most page views. Suddenly, there was a screen, and Pavarotti getting ready to sing, then singing, but I couldn't hear anything. I reached for the speaker control, that I had never used, and hit the On button. The walls of the study bowed outward with the force of "Nessun Dorma" from Pavarotti and YouTube. I got it under control and was astonished by the fidelity and power of the audio.
Karen heard the eruption and ran to see. She absolutely loves Pavarotti and this is her favorite aria of his, and so we listened to it until our ears rang.
That was the first day. Since then, I have discovered there are almost no songs that you can't find on YouTube. To a man who was a teenager in the 1950s, with a bunch of 45s in the closet and nothing to play them on now, this was a gold mine. I have listened to so many oldies, flabbergasted by the easy access to such treasure, and the one I always go back to is "Matchbox," written and originally performed by Carl Perkins.
But that's not the version I go to. A wonderful thing about YouTube is the clips you find from television specials that get the old rock and rollers back together, playing the old songs, but with recording techniques vastly improved from the '50s. As an example, I offer you a 1985 clip of Carl Perkins, Ringo Starr, and Eric Clapton, playing "Matchbox." Strap yourself in, and click here.
So this, I discover, is what music really is. Music is a universe train. From the first note to the last, I feel like I can't get off "Matchbox" even if I wanted to. Locally, of course, the music creates sound waves that enter the ear, excite the brain, heat the heart, stimulate the blood, and zoom straight to the feet, which is miraculous enough.
But there is something grander. I am a captive observer, like Einstein, aboard a universe train, powered by a primary motor that is fueled by mathematical vibrations. Music is nothing but mathematics, just as all the physical laws – the universe itself – are mathematics, all these numbers and laws blasted instantaneously into being and spreading out, until on Earth, billions of years later, someone figured out how to tap into that original music vibration with six strings and a fretboard. Strum a G chord, and you are listening all the way back to the beginning of time. Strum a C chord, and in these specialized physics, it shimmers evenly through the universe to all its borders. Hit an E, A and B7 in locomotive rhythm, and the universe starts to rock.
What a good idea it was, then, to include "Johnny B. Goode" in the music launched with the Voyager space probe in 1977. There was a plaque on board, describing us, but it's the music that will turn the trick. Scientists estimate it will be 40,000 years before Voyager might encounter life forms out there. They may have two heads, eight eyes and six legs, but as soon as they listen to "Johnny B. Goode," and look down and see their six feet tapping, they will be sure there's a civilization out there in space that knows what they know.
June 29, 2009
Media Literacy: In celebrity news, only the names change
My God. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays. A cultural Apocalypse.
And so instructive, a sad but golden opportunity, in acquiring media literacy. Please note: media literacy remains constant, just as reading literacy remains constant. Only the characters change, presenting the new opportunity to understand the constant literacy. Below is a blog from two years ago, about media literacy. It was June, 2007, and famous people were making news, as they always do. At that time, the celebrities were Paris Hilton, being arrested and taken to jail, and Anna Nicole Smith, who had died too young. It may seem creepy, the way the sad stories about celebrities all look the same, but, like the old blog begins, it is only the media codes at work . . .
June, 2007 – So many opportunities lately to review the media codes at work. If you are wondering about media coverage of the Paris Hilton situation, the media codes are working pretty much as they are supposed to, just as they did three or four months ago after the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Both stories would be tragic, if they had happened to just anybody. Since they happened to Paris and Anna Nicole, they made news. And the news made news.
People seem forever mystified by the media and how it works, but it is only a relatively simple matter of ages-old media codes at work. The codes are a collection of values, definitions and principles that the media uses to do its work. A few of the codes were developed by mass media, after its introduction to civilization in the 15th century, but most of the codes were already at work tens of thousands of years before that. All the media did was take those ancient codes, the original human "reaction package," and turn them into a business.
In fact that is the first key to acquiring media literacy. When you wonder why the paparazzi would chase Princess Diana into a tunnel, or swarm over a squad car to get photos of an airhead Paris Hilton in anguish, remember the First Law of Media: the media is a business. Paparazzi regard Paris Hilton with the same impersonal professionalism fishermen regard a prize tuna. The catch will sell for a lot of money to the purveyors, who know there is a select and faithful clientele for it. When you can think of CNN as a popular sushi joint, then you are starting to understand the Paris Hilton media coverage.
In the age of the Internet, with its very low production overhead, it starts to make good media business sense to focus exclusively on the Paris types. Hence the success of tmz.com, the Los Angeles-based online purveyor of celebrity news and gossip. The vast majority may call it tripe, but tmz.com doesn’t care about the vast majority. Its customers love tripe, and it wants to be the best menudo café in town. It's only business.
Given that reality, the media stories about the media stories about Anna Nicole, and now Paris, are amazing in their stances of bemused befuddlement, and cautionary clucks of concern. Media professionals – reporters, editors, critics – go to school and get four-year degrees in the media codes. Surely they understand that which they profess not to. So the media stories about the media stories must also be a business deal, based on an audience they know is there. This is the audience, and it is a significant one, of people angrily demanding that the media explain itself. Those people are serious about that, because they honestly have no clue about the media codes, and how the media does its job. That is perfectly normal; they lack media literacy, because they didn't study it in school. The New York Times took that audience seriously enough to place a Paris story on its Saturday Page One, one-column, left bottom of the page.
A meaningful media story about the Paris media stories would simply explain that it is media business as usual, nothing to worry about, that the nation is not in danger of falling in line to be led by Paris Hilton into the slimy bog of celebrity hugging at the end of civilization. Yet in its first paragraph, The Times spoke of a "national obsession with celebrity." If you check the CNN and Fox ratings for last Friday, the Paris peak day, you probably will find Neilsen ratings in the 3 range, translating into maybe eight million viewers, meaning 97 percent of viewers, or 292 million of the population, was doing something somewhere else.
I would not credit eight million people with constituting a national obsession. They do make a crowd at the menudo café, though, which is fine for the tripe lovers, who are not going away however much the "story about the story" audience may tremble for the nation. That audience, whatever its rating size, is only a spike audience, good for one or two newspaper editions or evening news segments. Then it will disappear, as the Paris story becomes old, which it will, as ancient as the Anna Nicole story, which was four months ago.
Footnote from the present: I would guess that the ratings would be about a 10 for Michael Jackson's death, 7 for Farrah, 4 for Ed McMahon, and less than 1for Billy Mays. Taken together, that means about 22 percent of the available audience paid much attention to the coverage, in accordance with the Second Law of Media, which states, "The media is an exercise in the power of small numbers."
And so instructive, a sad but golden opportunity, in acquiring media literacy. Please note: media literacy remains constant, just as reading literacy remains constant. Only the characters change, presenting the new opportunity to understand the constant literacy. Below is a blog from two years ago, about media literacy. It was June, 2007, and famous people were making news, as they always do. At that time, the celebrities were Paris Hilton, being arrested and taken to jail, and Anna Nicole Smith, who had died too young. It may seem creepy, the way the sad stories about celebrities all look the same, but, like the old blog begins, it is only the media codes at work . . .
June, 2007 – So many opportunities lately to review the media codes at work. If you are wondering about media coverage of the Paris Hilton situation, the media codes are working pretty much as they are supposed to, just as they did three or four months ago after the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
Both stories would be tragic, if they had happened to just anybody. Since they happened to Paris and Anna Nicole, they made news. And the news made news.
People seem forever mystified by the media and how it works, but it is only a relatively simple matter of ages-old media codes at work. The codes are a collection of values, definitions and principles that the media uses to do its work. A few of the codes were developed by mass media, after its introduction to civilization in the 15th century, but most of the codes were already at work tens of thousands of years before that. All the media did was take those ancient codes, the original human "reaction package," and turn them into a business.
In fact that is the first key to acquiring media literacy. When you wonder why the paparazzi would chase Princess Diana into a tunnel, or swarm over a squad car to get photos of an airhead Paris Hilton in anguish, remember the First Law of Media: the media is a business. Paparazzi regard Paris Hilton with the same impersonal professionalism fishermen regard a prize tuna. The catch will sell for a lot of money to the purveyors, who know there is a select and faithful clientele for it. When you can think of CNN as a popular sushi joint, then you are starting to understand the Paris Hilton media coverage.
In the age of the Internet, with its very low production overhead, it starts to make good media business sense to focus exclusively on the Paris types. Hence the success of tmz.com, the Los Angeles-based online purveyor of celebrity news and gossip. The vast majority may call it tripe, but tmz.com doesn’t care about the vast majority. Its customers love tripe, and it wants to be the best menudo café in town. It's only business.
Given that reality, the media stories about the media stories about Anna Nicole, and now Paris, are amazing in their stances of bemused befuddlement, and cautionary clucks of concern. Media professionals – reporters, editors, critics – go to school and get four-year degrees in the media codes. Surely they understand that which they profess not to. So the media stories about the media stories must also be a business deal, based on an audience they know is there. This is the audience, and it is a significant one, of people angrily demanding that the media explain itself. Those people are serious about that, because they honestly have no clue about the media codes, and how the media does its job. That is perfectly normal; they lack media literacy, because they didn't study it in school. The New York Times took that audience seriously enough to place a Paris story on its Saturday Page One, one-column, left bottom of the page.
A meaningful media story about the Paris media stories would simply explain that it is media business as usual, nothing to worry about, that the nation is not in danger of falling in line to be led by Paris Hilton into the slimy bog of celebrity hugging at the end of civilization. Yet in its first paragraph, The Times spoke of a "national obsession with celebrity." If you check the CNN and Fox ratings for last Friday, the Paris peak day, you probably will find Neilsen ratings in the 3 range, translating into maybe eight million viewers, meaning 97 percent of viewers, or 292 million of the population, was doing something somewhere else.
I would not credit eight million people with constituting a national obsession. They do make a crowd at the menudo café, though, which is fine for the tripe lovers, who are not going away however much the "story about the story" audience may tremble for the nation. That audience, whatever its rating size, is only a spike audience, good for one or two newspaper editions or evening news segments. Then it will disappear, as the Paris story becomes old, which it will, as ancient as the Anna Nicole story, which was four months ago.
Footnote from the present: I would guess that the ratings would be about a 10 for Michael Jackson's death, 7 for Farrah, 4 for Ed McMahon, and less than 1for Billy Mays. Taken together, that means about 22 percent of the available audience paid much attention to the coverage, in accordance with the Second Law of Media, which states, "The media is an exercise in the power of small numbers."
June 27, 2009
God, teach them how to spell
If it comes down to putting God or literacy first in my life, then, in front of God and everybody, I choose literacy. God, if you disagree, so be it. But I don't think you do. I am one of those people who keep you in my life, but not first. I am a believer in the God who gives people the gumption to help themselves.
My kind looks curiously at people, well-meaning as they may be, who trust you to take care of them completely. A present example: On Friday, The New York Times published a story about a football league in Georgia, created for kids of high school age who are home-schooled, probably for reasons of faith, because the name of the league is the Glory for Christ Football League.
Among several photos accompanying the story is one of a sign on a chain link fence at a practice facility. The sign reads:
North Ga. Falcons
Priority List
1. God
2. Family
3. Acedemics
4. Atheletics
There are no exceptions! – Coach McDaniel
God, this makes me mad. I am a teacher, and I bust my butt, semester after semester, to teach kids the important of literacy. In my subject, which is journalism, literacy is the First Cardinal Rule. Why? Because it is a matter of credibility. If a reporter misspells a word, or fractures grammar, in the first paragraph, the reader will ask: How can I trust this reporter to give me an accurate story about the game, or the election, or the budget, or the Glory for Christ Football League?
Yes, we all make mistakes, but literacy, God, gives us the power to minimize those mistakes, and the willingness to look up the spelling of a word, such as "academics," or "athletics," before committing it to public view. My kind of people thank you for contributing to the events that provided us the kind of brain which recognizes our opportunity to seize that option.
Please, God. You have such a high place in Coach McDaniel's life. Encourage him to consider an exception in his priority list for the young people in his charge. As it stands, he is not providing them their best chance to get into college. Forgive me, but they would not pass my class.
My kind looks curiously at people, well-meaning as they may be, who trust you to take care of them completely. A present example: On Friday, The New York Times published a story about a football league in Georgia, created for kids of high school age who are home-schooled, probably for reasons of faith, because the name of the league is the Glory for Christ Football League.
Among several photos accompanying the story is one of a sign on a chain link fence at a practice facility. The sign reads:
North Ga. Falcons
Priority List
1. God
2. Family
3. Acedemics
4. Atheletics
There are no exceptions! – Coach McDaniel
God, this makes me mad. I am a teacher, and I bust my butt, semester after semester, to teach kids the important of literacy. In my subject, which is journalism, literacy is the First Cardinal Rule. Why? Because it is a matter of credibility. If a reporter misspells a word, or fractures grammar, in the first paragraph, the reader will ask: How can I trust this reporter to give me an accurate story about the game, or the election, or the budget, or the Glory for Christ Football League?
Yes, we all make mistakes, but literacy, God, gives us the power to minimize those mistakes, and the willingness to look up the spelling of a word, such as "academics," or "athletics," before committing it to public view. My kind of people thank you for contributing to the events that provided us the kind of brain which recognizes our opportunity to seize that option.
Please, God. You have such a high place in Coach McDaniel's life. Encourage him to consider an exception in his priority list for the young people in his charge. As it stands, he is not providing them their best chance to get into college. Forgive me, but they would not pass my class.
June 26, 2009
Elvis and Michael
The young Elvis Presley gave the illusion, most clearly in 1957's "Jailhouse Rock," he could move his legs in two directions at the same time, which pretty much says it about Michael Jackson's moonwalk.
Thus, Elvis was the young Michael Jackson's role model. Neither man could sit still, while singing a song, and both men knew how to move it. They knew that moving was part of singing, at least the way they sang. More importantly, they knew, or learned, that's what their fans wanted. He's got a great voice, a powerful, sexy, voice, but an Elvis fan can't watch "Jailhouse Rock" without being moved, powerfully, by how the man is moving. By then, the movements were not spontaneous, but choreographed, and much deeper, sensually, than Elvis might have managed by himself. The movement was that important.
A Michael Jackson fan can't watch "Thriller" without wanting to move like the man, whose moves, if they originated with Elvis, were different from the King's because they were not only choreographed, but tightly choreographed. The step Elvis created was compared to a dead man walking. By Michael Jackson's time, he looked like a robot responding to a remote.
Did Michael take off on Elvis? I think so. Michael was the black Elvis. I have heard several commentators compare Elvis and Michael as being "unique," and I think that is right. The only difference is, Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, came first. Michael may have liked to be the King of Rock and Roll, but that was already taken. So he became the King of Pop. He couldn't be "Michael the Pelvis," so instead he grabbed his crotch. Elvis had Graceland, Michael had Neverland. He COULD wear outlandish performing outfits, and he wore them a lot better than Elvis could, strapped into his white flight suits. And, of course, Michael married Elvis Presley's daughter.
Their lives - brilliance decaying into the bizarre - and deaths were eerily the same – cardiac arrest bringing down dissipated bodies in the early afternoon, at far too young an age – but Michael's death didn't rock me, the way Elvis's did, because I was an Elvis fan, and only a Michael observer. Fans attach, physically and emotionally, to their stars. In media literacy studies, we call it the "proximity value." There is a direct connection between what the star is doing and how the fan is reacting. That's physical closeness. Emotionally, the fan wants to be like the star. I wish I looked like that. I wish I could sing like that. I wish I could move my legs like that. I wish I was rich and famous like that. I'll buy stuff that will make me feel closer to him.
Michael's fans are shocked today, and every Elvis fan knows how they feel. It was early afternoon in The San Diego Union newsroom when news of Elvis's death arrived, on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 1977. Denise Carabet, an erudite, worldly, brilliant, business world expert and financial writer, came back from lunch with her mouth open a foot. Elvis never had a bigger fan than Denise, or me. Getting out the Wednesday paper that day was an exercise in professionalism for many of us.
Elvis had long since become a blubbery caricature, but he had long since given me what I wanted. I had those 1954-57 years, and when Elvis came back from the Army in 1960 and started singing pop songs and making snoozer movies, I more or less left him behind. It wasn't fair. But fans are rarely fair with their stars. I will take his Sun Studios songs with me to my grave, and when he died at 42, I discovered, angrily, that I had wanted him to live up to that immortality. Not for his sake (though that would have been nice) but for mine.
Thus, Elvis was the young Michael Jackson's role model. Neither man could sit still, while singing a song, and both men knew how to move it. They knew that moving was part of singing, at least the way they sang. More importantly, they knew, or learned, that's what their fans wanted. He's got a great voice, a powerful, sexy, voice, but an Elvis fan can't watch "Jailhouse Rock" without being moved, powerfully, by how the man is moving. By then, the movements were not spontaneous, but choreographed, and much deeper, sensually, than Elvis might have managed by himself. The movement was that important.
A Michael Jackson fan can't watch "Thriller" without wanting to move like the man, whose moves, if they originated with Elvis, were different from the King's because they were not only choreographed, but tightly choreographed. The step Elvis created was compared to a dead man walking. By Michael Jackson's time, he looked like a robot responding to a remote.
Did Michael take off on Elvis? I think so. Michael was the black Elvis. I have heard several commentators compare Elvis and Michael as being "unique," and I think that is right. The only difference is, Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, came first. Michael may have liked to be the King of Rock and Roll, but that was already taken. So he became the King of Pop. He couldn't be "Michael the Pelvis," so instead he grabbed his crotch. Elvis had Graceland, Michael had Neverland. He COULD wear outlandish performing outfits, and he wore them a lot better than Elvis could, strapped into his white flight suits. And, of course, Michael married Elvis Presley's daughter.
Their lives - brilliance decaying into the bizarre - and deaths were eerily the same – cardiac arrest bringing down dissipated bodies in the early afternoon, at far too young an age – but Michael's death didn't rock me, the way Elvis's did, because I was an Elvis fan, and only a Michael observer. Fans attach, physically and emotionally, to their stars. In media literacy studies, we call it the "proximity value." There is a direct connection between what the star is doing and how the fan is reacting. That's physical closeness. Emotionally, the fan wants to be like the star. I wish I looked like that. I wish I could sing like that. I wish I could move my legs like that. I wish I was rich and famous like that. I'll buy stuff that will make me feel closer to him.
Michael's fans are shocked today, and every Elvis fan knows how they feel. It was early afternoon in The San Diego Union newsroom when news of Elvis's death arrived, on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 1977. Denise Carabet, an erudite, worldly, brilliant, business world expert and financial writer, came back from lunch with her mouth open a foot. Elvis never had a bigger fan than Denise, or me. Getting out the Wednesday paper that day was an exercise in professionalism for many of us.
Elvis had long since become a blubbery caricature, but he had long since given me what I wanted. I had those 1954-57 years, and when Elvis came back from the Army in 1960 and started singing pop songs and making snoozer movies, I more or less left him behind. It wasn't fair. But fans are rarely fair with their stars. I will take his Sun Studios songs with me to my grave, and when he died at 42, I discovered, angrily, that I had wanted him to live up to that immortality. Not for his sake (though that would have been nice) but for mine.
June 25, 2009
Stretch Cooking: A meat-and-three to slim the wallet
In most meat-and-three establishments, you can expect the bill for two to run about $20. At Art Smith's place in Chicago, the bill for two was $200.
Smith was Oprah's personal chef for some time, then two years ago, he opened his own place, Table 52, on Elm St. just off State. It is not your classic meat-and-three; the setting is comfortable but refined, and the menu is definitely upscale and features entrees like Pistachio-Crusted Chicken Breast and Ancho Chili-Crusted Berkshire Pork Chop.
But there is an unmistakable meat-and-three presence in the place, as if Art Smith, a native Southerner, put it there so people could see it, if they knew what to look for. Reading the menu, I had the feeling that Smith put it there on some kind of a personal dare that went something like, "I bet I can open a Chicago restaurant where I can sell catfish and three sides for $26."
In fact that is where my eye stopped, on the menu, and would go no farther. I read: "Cornmeal Crusted Catfish with Cheese Grits, Bacon-Braised Collard Greens, Hush Puppy and Crispy Okra - $26." Art, my man, you did it. I will gladly go back any time to Table 52 and pay $26 for the catfish and three. The only thing missing was the muddiness of a river-caught catfish, which is impossible to find anymore; catfish are all farm-raised now. Art Smith, of course, would know this, and regret it; his biographical material says he grew up in northern Florida and learned to cook from an African-American woman who was his baby-sitter. If she is alive, she will roll her eyes at her protégé serving up farm-raised catfish, but there are some things in the modern world that you can't do much about.
Karen and I also shared fried green tomatoes ($9), gussied up and served as a starter: ""Fried Green Tomato Napoleon with Goat Cheese, Local Greens, Applewood-Smoked Bacon & Olive & Sun-Dried Tomato Tapenades." It was a cute stack of the fried tomatoes and the other stuff in between, which was tasty and didn't get in the way of the fried tomatoes.
Then, with our entrees (Karen departed the Southern mood with fresh Alaskan halibut, simply grilled), we shared a side of macaroni and cheese, which was $9 and worth it. We had seen another patron being served a large bowl with cheese crusted on the top and spilling over the sides, and we thought it was onion soup. It was macaroni and cheese, filled to overflowing, then finished off in a pizza oven that turned the overflow dribbles brown and crusty. If we had a pizza oven, I would try this at home, one or two nights a week.
I was chipping greedily at the cheese crust when a waiter passed our table with a slice of a towering, heavily frosted, three-layer cake, invoking visions of the Membership Luncheon of the Atlanta Woman's Club. This, we learned, was Hummingbird Cake, which we could neither pass up, nor finish. We took the last of it with us and stumbled out the door into a driving rain and a cab back to our hotel.
The bill would have been lower without glasses of champagne and a bottle of wine, but what the heck. You don't just drink iced tea at Art Smith's kind of meat-and-three.
Smith was Oprah's personal chef for some time, then two years ago, he opened his own place, Table 52, on Elm St. just off State. It is not your classic meat-and-three; the setting is comfortable but refined, and the menu is definitely upscale and features entrees like Pistachio-Crusted Chicken Breast and Ancho Chili-Crusted Berkshire Pork Chop.
But there is an unmistakable meat-and-three presence in the place, as if Art Smith, a native Southerner, put it there so people could see it, if they knew what to look for. Reading the menu, I had the feeling that Smith put it there on some kind of a personal dare that went something like, "I bet I can open a Chicago restaurant where I can sell catfish and three sides for $26."
In fact that is where my eye stopped, on the menu, and would go no farther. I read: "Cornmeal Crusted Catfish with Cheese Grits, Bacon-Braised Collard Greens, Hush Puppy and Crispy Okra - $26." Art, my man, you did it. I will gladly go back any time to Table 52 and pay $26 for the catfish and three. The only thing missing was the muddiness of a river-caught catfish, which is impossible to find anymore; catfish are all farm-raised now. Art Smith, of course, would know this, and regret it; his biographical material says he grew up in northern Florida and learned to cook from an African-American woman who was his baby-sitter. If she is alive, she will roll her eyes at her protégé serving up farm-raised catfish, but there are some things in the modern world that you can't do much about.
Karen and I also shared fried green tomatoes ($9), gussied up and served as a starter: ""Fried Green Tomato Napoleon with Goat Cheese, Local Greens, Applewood-Smoked Bacon & Olive & Sun-Dried Tomato Tapenades." It was a cute stack of the fried tomatoes and the other stuff in between, which was tasty and didn't get in the way of the fried tomatoes.
Then, with our entrees (Karen departed the Southern mood with fresh Alaskan halibut, simply grilled), we shared a side of macaroni and cheese, which was $9 and worth it. We had seen another patron being served a large bowl with cheese crusted on the top and spilling over the sides, and we thought it was onion soup. It was macaroni and cheese, filled to overflowing, then finished off in a pizza oven that turned the overflow dribbles brown and crusty. If we had a pizza oven, I would try this at home, one or two nights a week.
I was chipping greedily at the cheese crust when a waiter passed our table with a slice of a towering, heavily frosted, three-layer cake, invoking visions of the Membership Luncheon of the Atlanta Woman's Club. This, we learned, was Hummingbird Cake, which we could neither pass up, nor finish. We took the last of it with us and stumbled out the door into a driving rain and a cab back to our hotel.
The bill would have been lower without glasses of champagne and a bottle of wine, but what the heck. You don't just drink iced tea at Art Smith's kind of meat-and-three.
June 24, 2009
The woman in Seat 5B
You may remember in the movie, "Citizen Kane," the statement by one of the characters about seeing a girl on a ferry boat one day, seeing her for only one second, but remembering her for the rest of his life.
"I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since," he says, "that I haven't thought of that girl."
I think most of us have memories like that, of a person, or persons, we never met, and didn't know, but remember, even if we only saw them for one second. Or we might have a long-held fantasy about a person we might see one day. I have always thought how totally romantic it would be, if someday I got on an airplane and saw, among the passengers, a face, the most beautiful face I had ever seen.
Yesterday, Tuesday, June 23, 2009, just before 9 a.m., in Chicago, it happened. I was boarding a flight to San Diego. I was in Seat 10F and so in the last group, Group 6, to board. The airline industry is in wreckage, but they do at last know how to board a plane efficiently. The jetway wait was short, then I stepped through the door of the MD-80, glanced left at the pilots in the cockpit, and turned the corner around the closet into the aisle through First Class.
I glimpsed her around a shoulder in front of me. Honey-streaked blonde, a flash of brow, porcelain in the window light, and arched eyebrows. Instantly I was on full alert. There was a momentary jam-up, and then people parted, and there she was. Shoulder-length blonde, radiant skin, the arched brows, stunning facial mathematics, high cheekbones, full lips, good chin, everything. She was reading: "A Short History of Women," so she was not literary, but engaged in the world. And she was seated in First Class.
Normally one does not reveal emotion in a cabin cramped with strangers, but if I did not speak, I knew I would regret it the rest of my life. She was in Seat 5B, on the aisle, and as I reached her, I said, "You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life." She looked up and smiled. Beautiful smile. White, straight teeth. Her eyes were green or hazel. "Oh, go on," she said, the smile segueing into a grin. So she was a good sport. "Are you meeting someone in San Diego?" I said, barely believing my brazenness. "Shhh," she said. So she was shy, too! "Maybe we could get together," I said. She was tickled, but too embarrassed to respond. I couldn't believe someone so beautiful could be so, well, normal. I thought I had better shut up. Besides, I had had my fantasy moment. "Don't forget my offer," I said over my shoulder as we moved on. I was amazed, how natural it had been. I didn't know if any other passengers had reacted or not. But did it really matter? I felt different about myself, less cautious, in a way that I look forward to exploring.
From 10F I had a good view of the back of her honey-streaked head. I have always been interested in the energy that can pass through an objective space between two people, even when one is not aware of the other. I have seen girlfriend, wife, children, through a window, a block away, unaware of my watching them, and felt my heart leap, at the connection with them, invisible but as real as a radio beam passing through space. I glanced at her occasionally during the flight routine, glad that she knew I was an occupant of the planet.
I am pretty sure we were over New Mexico when I had an idea. Something I had only seen in movies. I took an airplane napkin, turned it over, and wrote a message: "Would you please deliver a glass of champagne to the delightful woman in 5B, from the gentleman in 10F." She appeared to be asleep, so I held on to the message. Then she stirred. She actually looked back, and our eyes met. We waved. In a minute I was able to get the attention of the First Class flight attendant. She read the note and grinned and walked back into First Class.
Then, horrors! The delightful woman stood up and walked forward, out of view, I supposed to the restroom. While she was gone, a second flight attendant walked back, grinned at me, and handed me a glass of champagne with a strawberry in it. "From a delighted flight attendant," she said. The woman finally came back, took her seat. The first FA appeared with a glass of champagne, leaned over her, and gave her the message. The woman looked back at me and smiled, and I gave her a casual salute, Maurice Chevalier-style. And that was that. A fantasy fulfilled, a memory etched indelibly.
We landed, got off, and she was waiting for me in the concourse. You wouldn't believe how cool it is when a fantasy shifts into reality. I am the woman's husband. It doesn't matter how we were sitting in separate sections, except to say it enabled the fantasy. I took her arm, we collected our luggage, and went home, which was my First Class trip for the day.
"I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since," he says, "that I haven't thought of that girl."
I think most of us have memories like that, of a person, or persons, we never met, and didn't know, but remember, even if we only saw them for one second. Or we might have a long-held fantasy about a person we might see one day. I have always thought how totally romantic it would be, if someday I got on an airplane and saw, among the passengers, a face, the most beautiful face I had ever seen.
Yesterday, Tuesday, June 23, 2009, just before 9 a.m., in Chicago, it happened. I was boarding a flight to San Diego. I was in Seat 10F and so in the last group, Group 6, to board. The airline industry is in wreckage, but they do at last know how to board a plane efficiently. The jetway wait was short, then I stepped through the door of the MD-80, glanced left at the pilots in the cockpit, and turned the corner around the closet into the aisle through First Class.
I glimpsed her around a shoulder in front of me. Honey-streaked blonde, a flash of brow, porcelain in the window light, and arched eyebrows. Instantly I was on full alert. There was a momentary jam-up, and then people parted, and there she was. Shoulder-length blonde, radiant skin, the arched brows, stunning facial mathematics, high cheekbones, full lips, good chin, everything. She was reading: "A Short History of Women," so she was not literary, but engaged in the world. And she was seated in First Class.
Normally one does not reveal emotion in a cabin cramped with strangers, but if I did not speak, I knew I would regret it the rest of my life. She was in Seat 5B, on the aisle, and as I reached her, I said, "You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life." She looked up and smiled. Beautiful smile. White, straight teeth. Her eyes were green or hazel. "Oh, go on," she said, the smile segueing into a grin. So she was a good sport. "Are you meeting someone in San Diego?" I said, barely believing my brazenness. "Shhh," she said. So she was shy, too! "Maybe we could get together," I said. She was tickled, but too embarrassed to respond. I couldn't believe someone so beautiful could be so, well, normal. I thought I had better shut up. Besides, I had had my fantasy moment. "Don't forget my offer," I said over my shoulder as we moved on. I was amazed, how natural it had been. I didn't know if any other passengers had reacted or not. But did it really matter? I felt different about myself, less cautious, in a way that I look forward to exploring.
From 10F I had a good view of the back of her honey-streaked head. I have always been interested in the energy that can pass through an objective space between two people, even when one is not aware of the other. I have seen girlfriend, wife, children, through a window, a block away, unaware of my watching them, and felt my heart leap, at the connection with them, invisible but as real as a radio beam passing through space. I glanced at her occasionally during the flight routine, glad that she knew I was an occupant of the planet.
I am pretty sure we were over New Mexico when I had an idea. Something I had only seen in movies. I took an airplane napkin, turned it over, and wrote a message: "Would you please deliver a glass of champagne to the delightful woman in 5B, from the gentleman in 10F." She appeared to be asleep, so I held on to the message. Then she stirred. She actually looked back, and our eyes met. We waved. In a minute I was able to get the attention of the First Class flight attendant. She read the note and grinned and walked back into First Class.
Then, horrors! The delightful woman stood up and walked forward, out of view, I supposed to the restroom. While she was gone, a second flight attendant walked back, grinned at me, and handed me a glass of champagne with a strawberry in it. "From a delighted flight attendant," she said. The woman finally came back, took her seat. The first FA appeared with a glass of champagne, leaned over her, and gave her the message. The woman looked back at me and smiled, and I gave her a casual salute, Maurice Chevalier-style. And that was that. A fantasy fulfilled, a memory etched indelibly.
We landed, got off, and she was waiting for me in the concourse. You wouldn't believe how cool it is when a fantasy shifts into reality. I am the woman's husband. It doesn't matter how we were sitting in separate sections, except to say it enabled the fantasy. I took her arm, we collected our luggage, and went home, which was my First Class trip for the day.
June 22, 2009
Media Literacy: Paperazzi and Macramé Journalism
A couple of weeks ago, in the Media Literacy series, I used the word, "paperazzi." That was not a spelling error. "Paparazzi" use cameras. "Paperazzi" use words. In the spring of 2008, Mayhill Fowler became the first paperazzo in digital media history.
Fowler was functioning at the time as an unpaid macramé journalist (another unfortunate, if not so dangerous, category of digital new-age journalism) for the online publication The Huffington Post.
The Post, exploring the potential for this new macramé journalism, had created a feature called "Off the Bus," in which volunteer "citizen journalists," performing essentially as bloggers, fanned out to write about the 2008 presidential campaign. Under its "Off the Bus Masthead" page, HuffPost describes the operation: "Off the Bus is a citizen-powered and –produced presidential campaign news site sponsored by The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net . . . The project depends, in large part, on its on-the-ground citizen reporters and on cutting-edge distributed reporting techniques." No professional journalism experience was required.
It was not an original idea. Traditional print organizations, mainly newspapers, were already experimenting with "citizen journalism" as a trendy, attractive, feel-good (and very inexpensive) feature of their online operations. But by summer, 2008, Huffington Post was easily the largest citizen journalism venue, with 7,500 contributors on the rolls. Boston journalist Mike Barnicle likened citizen journalism to "300 million columnists with access to a computer." Someone else said it was like "a huge letters to the editor page."
As a veteran journalist and recipient of who knows how many letters to the editor, I read this "citizen journalism" news with sadness. It reminded me of the old town squares. Town squares, at the center of the small rural towns across America, achieved a place of heartfelt distinction in American 20th-century lore. By the 1950s, and the arrival of better highways and more comfortable cars, residents of those towns had started to drive to larger regional cities to shop, eat, and see a movie. Around the town square, businesses closed, leaving darkened brick shells through which dry goods, sundries, hardware, groceries, insurance, movie stars, blue-plate specials and fountain Cokes had flowed.
In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: "Macramé." It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts hobbyists learning to knot yarn in a certain trendy way.
The business of journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now journalism is being gutted by backdrafts of stockholder economics and technology, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a fourth world that will not be easily explored or understood.
Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism on the rise, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. Mayhill Fowler became one of these. She is a pretty good writer, though long-winded and totally chronological, as most non-journalists are, and she has said some things that chill me. To Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post she said she "refuses to read her postings online, in part because she doesn't like the way editors sometimes change her lead sentence 'because they want people to click on it.' "
In the history of journalism, reporters have spent cumulatively thousands of years wracking their brains over a lead sentence (we call it a "lede" in the trade) that would click with people. People in journalism share a common living nightmare. We spend hours trying to think of a great lede, and, with sufficient experience, 75 percent of the time we succeed. But sometimes deadline arrives and we have to send the story off, a single chance gone forever, a bullet that has been fired, with a lede that is just functional. At 3 a.m., we wake up and there, in the darkness, is the lede we wanted to write, glowing, gloating, screaming at us.
But that's not it. All writing is hard work, and Fowler's writing shows that she works hard, even if she does not know a good lede from a bad clam. What is troubling is her indifference to readers who want to be clicked with, want a good lede, and the media illiteracy that reveals. Macramé journalists don't understand, because they have never been taught, that people are the authors of the media code, and thus the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, journalist Jeff Greenfield laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."
Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Journalists, educated in these realities and principles, write to it, write to the people, as if through a window which no power, natural or man-made, can close. Mayhill Fowler, unaware of the principles, writes to a mirror, in which only one person appears.
Escorting her through the looking glass would not be difficult. It is only the same screen, between the public and media literacy, that could so easily be removed by one semester in the public's education. In one of probably millions of comments posted online on the citizen journalist topic, journalist Patrick Salem hit the nail almost on the head when he said: "A good grammar book and a couple of hours with an old city editor is about all the training anyone needs to be a journalist." I might give the old city editor a couple of weeks, but otherwise I agree completely. The same result would be achieved if Mayhill Fowler read this Media Literacy series every Monday. As a citizen journalist, she is the subject of a purpose of this blog: If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to "open up" newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101.
The code is the subject – and I am trying to keep it the sole subject – of this blog, but once a media literacy project is under way, it is almost impossible to keep its subject from expanding. For example, not until now did I suppose I would have to address the common good sense of journalists identifying themselves to people they want to question. Now that Mayhill Fowler has introduced the word "paperazzo" into the media glossary, it is important to take a couple of paragraphs to look at journalism ethics and strategy.
It's probably not necessary to go into too much detail about the original paparazzi. That famed, or infamous, industry, seeks to record with cameras the unguarded moments of well-known people. Celebrities employ laborious, often degrading, and sometimes devastating defenses against the paparazzi, but the best defense – the ability to disappear on command – is not available to them.
Not so with the paperazzi. Twice, as of this writing, Mayhill Fowler has succeeded in publishing unguarded quotes from famous people – then-Senator Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton – who didn't know she was a paperazzo. They do now. And now that the threat is known, they have an effortless, foolproof paperazzi defense to employ. They can simply shut up. Thus is journalism's access to "the widest possible range of information" crimped, in a way that may be difficult to undo.
“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Newsweek political journalist Jonathan Alter told The New York Times.
“In the interest of full disclosure, it would have been better if she said, ‘Mr. President, I’m a blogger from Off the Bus and I have a question,’ ” said Jay Rosen, a journalism educator and the co-creator, with the Huff Post, of Off the Bus. “We didn’t anticipate exact circumstances like this. We didn’t think up guidelines for what to tell her in a situation like this.”
What a strange thing for a New York University journalism professor to say. His explanation begs a question. Well, several questions. What guidelines were there to think up? Wouldn't the old ones do? They have worked well enough for more than 200 years. Is media literacy relative in the fourth world? Does one standard apply to professionals like Jay Rosen, and another standard to media-illiterate macramé journalists who Mayhill Fowler represents so well? If so, won't that crimp the people's access to the widest possible range of information? Won't that abridge the freedom of the press? Could macramé journalism and roving bands of paperazzi ("Guidelines? We don't need no stinking guidelines") torch the First Amendment, and make the gutting of the old journalism complete? Will people, who gave the press its power, be the ones finally to take it away?
Are there answers to these questions? Yes. Two weeks with an old city editor should do it. Or you can read this blog, and go to the media literacy sites it links to. It's only education.
Fowler was functioning at the time as an unpaid macramé journalist (another unfortunate, if not so dangerous, category of digital new-age journalism) for the online publication The Huffington Post.
The Post, exploring the potential for this new macramé journalism, had created a feature called "Off the Bus," in which volunteer "citizen journalists," performing essentially as bloggers, fanned out to write about the 2008 presidential campaign. Under its "Off the Bus Masthead" page, HuffPost describes the operation: "Off the Bus is a citizen-powered and –produced presidential campaign news site sponsored by The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net . . . The project depends, in large part, on its on-the-ground citizen reporters and on cutting-edge distributed reporting techniques." No professional journalism experience was required.
It was not an original idea. Traditional print organizations, mainly newspapers, were already experimenting with "citizen journalism" as a trendy, attractive, feel-good (and very inexpensive) feature of their online operations. But by summer, 2008, Huffington Post was easily the largest citizen journalism venue, with 7,500 contributors on the rolls. Boston journalist Mike Barnicle likened citizen journalism to "300 million columnists with access to a computer." Someone else said it was like "a huge letters to the editor page."
As a veteran journalist and recipient of who knows how many letters to the editor, I read this "citizen journalism" news with sadness. It reminded me of the old town squares. Town squares, at the center of the small rural towns across America, achieved a place of heartfelt distinction in American 20th-century lore. By the 1950s, and the arrival of better highways and more comfortable cars, residents of those towns had started to drive to larger regional cities to shop, eat, and see a movie. Around the town square, businesses closed, leaving darkened brick shells through which dry goods, sundries, hardware, groceries, insurance, movie stars, blue-plate specials and fountain Cokes had flowed.
In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: "Macramé." It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts hobbyists learning to knot yarn in a certain trendy way.
The business of journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now journalism is being gutted by backdrafts of stockholder economics and technology, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a fourth world that will not be easily explored or understood.
Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism on the rise, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. Mayhill Fowler became one of these. She is a pretty good writer, though long-winded and totally chronological, as most non-journalists are, and she has said some things that chill me. To Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post she said she "refuses to read her postings online, in part because she doesn't like the way editors sometimes change her lead sentence 'because they want people to click on it.' "
In the history of journalism, reporters have spent cumulatively thousands of years wracking their brains over a lead sentence (we call it a "lede" in the trade) that would click with people. People in journalism share a common living nightmare. We spend hours trying to think of a great lede, and, with sufficient experience, 75 percent of the time we succeed. But sometimes deadline arrives and we have to send the story off, a single chance gone forever, a bullet that has been fired, with a lede that is just functional. At 3 a.m., we wake up and there, in the darkness, is the lede we wanted to write, glowing, gloating, screaming at us.
But that's not it. All writing is hard work, and Fowler's writing shows that she works hard, even if she does not know a good lede from a bad clam. What is troubling is her indifference to readers who want to be clicked with, want a good lede, and the media illiteracy that reveals. Macramé journalists don't understand, because they have never been taught, that people are the authors of the media code, and thus the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, journalist Jeff Greenfield laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."
Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Journalists, educated in these realities and principles, write to it, write to the people, as if through a window which no power, natural or man-made, can close. Mayhill Fowler, unaware of the principles, writes to a mirror, in which only one person appears.
Escorting her through the looking glass would not be difficult. It is only the same screen, between the public and media literacy, that could so easily be removed by one semester in the public's education. In one of probably millions of comments posted online on the citizen journalist topic, journalist Patrick Salem hit the nail almost on the head when he said: "A good grammar book and a couple of hours with an old city editor is about all the training anyone needs to be a journalist." I might give the old city editor a couple of weeks, but otherwise I agree completely. The same result would be achieved if Mayhill Fowler read this Media Literacy series every Monday. As a citizen journalist, she is the subject of a purpose of this blog: If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to "open up" newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101.
The code is the subject – and I am trying to keep it the sole subject – of this blog, but once a media literacy project is under way, it is almost impossible to keep its subject from expanding. For example, not until now did I suppose I would have to address the common good sense of journalists identifying themselves to people they want to question. Now that Mayhill Fowler has introduced the word "paperazzo" into the media glossary, it is important to take a couple of paragraphs to look at journalism ethics and strategy.
It's probably not necessary to go into too much detail about the original paparazzi. That famed, or infamous, industry, seeks to record with cameras the unguarded moments of well-known people. Celebrities employ laborious, often degrading, and sometimes devastating defenses against the paparazzi, but the best defense – the ability to disappear on command – is not available to them.
Not so with the paperazzi. Twice, as of this writing, Mayhill Fowler has succeeded in publishing unguarded quotes from famous people – then-Senator Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton – who didn't know she was a paperazzo. They do now. And now that the threat is known, they have an effortless, foolproof paperazzi defense to employ. They can simply shut up. Thus is journalism's access to "the widest possible range of information" crimped, in a way that may be difficult to undo.
“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Newsweek political journalist Jonathan Alter told The New York Times.
“In the interest of full disclosure, it would have been better if she said, ‘Mr. President, I’m a blogger from Off the Bus and I have a question,’ ” said Jay Rosen, a journalism educator and the co-creator, with the Huff Post, of Off the Bus. “We didn’t anticipate exact circumstances like this. We didn’t think up guidelines for what to tell her in a situation like this.”
What a strange thing for a New York University journalism professor to say. His explanation begs a question. Well, several questions. What guidelines were there to think up? Wouldn't the old ones do? They have worked well enough for more than 200 years. Is media literacy relative in the fourth world? Does one standard apply to professionals like Jay Rosen, and another standard to media-illiterate macramé journalists who Mayhill Fowler represents so well? If so, won't that crimp the people's access to the widest possible range of information? Won't that abridge the freedom of the press? Could macramé journalism and roving bands of paperazzi ("Guidelines? We don't need no stinking guidelines") torch the First Amendment, and make the gutting of the old journalism complete? Will people, who gave the press its power, be the ones finally to take it away?
Are there answers to these questions? Yes. Two weeks with an old city editor should do it. Or you can read this blog, and go to the media literacy sites it links to. It's only education.
June 19, 2009
Archives: Father's Day, 2006
Sunday is Father's Day. Here is a story from Father's Day three years ago, June, 2006.
Interesting trip. It was my first time through an airport security gate with my new metal hip and yes, it sets off the buzzer. I will never fly again without getting wanded and patted down first.
We were on the first American flight to Chicago, departing at 6:17 a.m.. It was also the very first airplane to take off that morning. Karen and I both like first flights of the day for two reasons: you know the airplane is already at the airport and not trying to get there from somewhere else; and, the security lines are shorter.
We buttoned up early, pushed back, taxied very slowly to the end of the runway. And sat there. The captain, Don Partridge, told us on the intercom that the Lindbergh Field curfew forbade any flight to take off before 6:30 a.m. I looked at my watch. It was 6:25. “If you can’t take off until 6:30,” Karen wondered, “why do they schedule the flight for 6:17?”
I shrugged. “Hitting for an average. If they schedule it for 6:17, it means they’ll probably get everybody on and seated by 6:20 or so, then make a couple of announcements, push back slowly, mosey down to the end of the runway and get there just at 6:30.”
At 6:29 and 30 seconds, Capt. Partridge nudged the engines and swung the S-80 into takeoff position on the runway and braked again. We waited, and I could imagine the tower counting down: “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”
And we went. Very first plane out of Lindbergh.
For breakfast, I had brought some cubed pork barbecue and a slice of CostCo’s rosemary bread. You can’t count on the airlines any more. In fact, here is where in-flight service stands now: the lead stew said they would be coming down the aisles with a choice of muffins: blueberry or bran, $2 each. I girded my loins, waiting for the charge for coffee, but it is still free, for the time being.
We were going to Kenosha, Wisconsin, an hour north of Chicago, right on Lake Michigan, to see Karen’s son Bill and his family. Before my first trip with Karen to Kenosha last year, I pictured it as an iron ore town with a grimy waterfront, huge smokestacks and gray streets. Instead it is green and clean with wide streets and manicured parks and shoreline beaches, population about 100,000 and bratwurst shops every half a mile or so. The only smoke in the air comes from cigarettes. Lots of smokers in Wisconsin, indoors and out. You don’t get a real sense of the value of California smoking laws until you visit places without such laws.
We ate well. Bill loves to cook, and for Father’s Day he got a Weber Smokey Mountain cooker, a huge smoker that Karen says looks like R2-D2. He bought a 10-pound brisket and put it in the smoker for nine and a half hours and it was the best home barbecue I ever had. I feel totally faithful to the Weber kettle I have had for 30 years, but that cooker, with its results, has wiggled its way into my thinking.
They do good pizza in Wisconsin, too, and of course the brats. “We should also hit The Spot,” Bill said. “A cheeseburger with grilled onions and a root beer whirl.” Time was getting away and we had not yet hit The Spot when I mentioned it one lunchtime. Everybody was still full from a late breakfast, so I went by myself. The Spot is a low, red, windowless structure on a corner with a painted, wrap-around menu board facing the street. The cheeseburger was $2.29. I pulled in, parked, got out, walked around the corner, looking for the door. I ran into a waitress who said, “Be right with you, hon.”
“You come to me?” I said. “Sure do,” she said. Then I looked again at the cars in the lot. A couple had trays hung from the windows. This was a drive-in! I had not seen a tray hanging from a car window in 40 years. There were three small tables under an overhang and I sat there; too hot in the car for a California boy. I ordered as instructed: “Cheeseburger, grilled onions.” “You want everything on that?” she said. “Yes,” I said.
In a few minutes she was back. I unwrapped the cheeseburger, which was piping hot. It was small, a soft, fragrant, bun, the meat bigger than the bun and griddle-fried until its uneven edges were crispy. “Everything” turned out to be pickle slices, mustard and catsup. It was perfect. There are times now – three or four of them in Kenosha, in fact – when I wish it was 30 years ago and I could eat two or three of The Spot’s cheeseburgers.
Bill and Erika’s son, nine-year-old Andrew, went four for six with three RBIs in his two Little League games while we were there. Andrew’s sister, Caitlin, age four, shared with me her concession stand box of popcorn that was as salty as it was half a century ago. The Little League parks were grassy and exceptionally well-groomed, a feeling we had about all of Kenosha. For Father’s Day, Bill took us to Wrigley Field. I wish all ballparks looked and felt like Wrigley Field. Being there was an experience in itself, which was good, because the Tigers hit three home runs in the top of the first and won, 12-3. There were 11 home runs in the game (the wind was blowing out) and one kid, sitting behind the Cubs’ dugout, caught two foul balls.
Coming home, the airline offered a snack box for $4, but I had leftover pizza, brats and coffee cake made from biscuits, cream cheese, orange zest, sugar, pecans and melted butter. Good trip.
Interesting trip. It was my first time through an airport security gate with my new metal hip and yes, it sets off the buzzer. I will never fly again without getting wanded and patted down first.
We were on the first American flight to Chicago, departing at 6:17 a.m.. It was also the very first airplane to take off that morning. Karen and I both like first flights of the day for two reasons: you know the airplane is already at the airport and not trying to get there from somewhere else; and, the security lines are shorter.
We buttoned up early, pushed back, taxied very slowly to the end of the runway. And sat there. The captain, Don Partridge, told us on the intercom that the Lindbergh Field curfew forbade any flight to take off before 6:30 a.m. I looked at my watch. It was 6:25. “If you can’t take off until 6:30,” Karen wondered, “why do they schedule the flight for 6:17?”
I shrugged. “Hitting for an average. If they schedule it for 6:17, it means they’ll probably get everybody on and seated by 6:20 or so, then make a couple of announcements, push back slowly, mosey down to the end of the runway and get there just at 6:30.”
At 6:29 and 30 seconds, Capt. Partridge nudged the engines and swung the S-80 into takeoff position on the runway and braked again. We waited, and I could imagine the tower counting down: “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”
And we went. Very first plane out of Lindbergh.
For breakfast, I had brought some cubed pork barbecue and a slice of CostCo’s rosemary bread. You can’t count on the airlines any more. In fact, here is where in-flight service stands now: the lead stew said they would be coming down the aisles with a choice of muffins: blueberry or bran, $2 each. I girded my loins, waiting for the charge for coffee, but it is still free, for the time being.
We were going to Kenosha, Wisconsin, an hour north of Chicago, right on Lake Michigan, to see Karen’s son Bill and his family. Before my first trip with Karen to Kenosha last year, I pictured it as an iron ore town with a grimy waterfront, huge smokestacks and gray streets. Instead it is green and clean with wide streets and manicured parks and shoreline beaches, population about 100,000 and bratwurst shops every half a mile or so. The only smoke in the air comes from cigarettes. Lots of smokers in Wisconsin, indoors and out. You don’t get a real sense of the value of California smoking laws until you visit places without such laws.
We ate well. Bill loves to cook, and for Father’s Day he got a Weber Smokey Mountain cooker, a huge smoker that Karen says looks like R2-D2. He bought a 10-pound brisket and put it in the smoker for nine and a half hours and it was the best home barbecue I ever had. I feel totally faithful to the Weber kettle I have had for 30 years, but that cooker, with its results, has wiggled its way into my thinking.
They do good pizza in Wisconsin, too, and of course the brats. “We should also hit The Spot,” Bill said. “A cheeseburger with grilled onions and a root beer whirl.” Time was getting away and we had not yet hit The Spot when I mentioned it one lunchtime. Everybody was still full from a late breakfast, so I went by myself. The Spot is a low, red, windowless structure on a corner with a painted, wrap-around menu board facing the street. The cheeseburger was $2.29. I pulled in, parked, got out, walked around the corner, looking for the door. I ran into a waitress who said, “Be right with you, hon.”
“You come to me?” I said. “Sure do,” she said. Then I looked again at the cars in the lot. A couple had trays hung from the windows. This was a drive-in! I had not seen a tray hanging from a car window in 40 years. There were three small tables under an overhang and I sat there; too hot in the car for a California boy. I ordered as instructed: “Cheeseburger, grilled onions.” “You want everything on that?” she said. “Yes,” I said.
In a few minutes she was back. I unwrapped the cheeseburger, which was piping hot. It was small, a soft, fragrant, bun, the meat bigger than the bun and griddle-fried until its uneven edges were crispy. “Everything” turned out to be pickle slices, mustard and catsup. It was perfect. There are times now – three or four of them in Kenosha, in fact – when I wish it was 30 years ago and I could eat two or three of The Spot’s cheeseburgers.
Bill and Erika’s son, nine-year-old Andrew, went four for six with three RBIs in his two Little League games while we were there. Andrew’s sister, Caitlin, age four, shared with me her concession stand box of popcorn that was as salty as it was half a century ago. The Little League parks were grassy and exceptionally well-groomed, a feeling we had about all of Kenosha. For Father’s Day, Bill took us to Wrigley Field. I wish all ballparks looked and felt like Wrigley Field. Being there was an experience in itself, which was good, because the Tigers hit three home runs in the top of the first and won, 12-3. There were 11 home runs in the game (the wind was blowing out) and one kid, sitting behind the Cubs’ dugout, caught two foul balls.
Coming home, the airline offered a snack box for $4, but I had leftover pizza, brats and coffee cake made from biscuits, cream cheese, orange zest, sugar, pecans and melted butter. Good trip.
June 18, 2009
Stretch Cooking: One Recipe Begets Another
Many stretch cooking recipes will yield some very nice leftovers, but several of these recipes actually yield two complete meals, the original, and then a second, which will be eaten the next day, or some day after that, but is too distinctive in its own right to be called a "leftover."
The most vivid example is ham. I love the definition of "eternity" in the classic "Joy of Cooking" cookbook: "Eternity is a ham and two people." The original recipe, of course, is baked ham. That one original recipe spawns a whole tree of second recipes, which take up several pages in the cookbook.
For the second recipe I am about to give you, the original is: spaghetti. There are a million original recipes for spaghetti, but the one I am referring to is the traditional spaghetti with meat – either hamburger or sausage – in a thick, rich, tomato-based sauce. That kind of spaghetti is very good, with garlic bread and a green salad, and its offspring recipe is just as good and totally different, even improved. In fact you will find some people – I am one – who would argue that the best reason for making spaghetti is so, a couple of days later, you can make Spaghetti Casserole.
You want to make enough of the original spaghetti to have plenty left over. After dinner, if you haven't already tossed the sauce into the pasta, do so. You should have at least a pound of pasta and three cups of sauce to put into the refrigerator.
When you want Spaghetti Casserole, dump the cold left-over spaghetti on a chopping board and chop it roughly. Place it in a large mixing bowl and add a can of drained corn, a 4-oz. can of button mushrooms, a quarter-cup of canned, sliced jalapenos (or more, or less, as you prefer), and a can of whole black olives, with the olives cut in half. Pour into a greased casserole dish, sprinkle liberally with cheese, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.
If you have leftovers from this dish, it is great for breakfast, spread cold between slices of sourdough, but that's another story.
The most vivid example is ham. I love the definition of "eternity" in the classic "Joy of Cooking" cookbook: "Eternity is a ham and two people." The original recipe, of course, is baked ham. That one original recipe spawns a whole tree of second recipes, which take up several pages in the cookbook.
For the second recipe I am about to give you, the original is: spaghetti. There are a million original recipes for spaghetti, but the one I am referring to is the traditional spaghetti with meat – either hamburger or sausage – in a thick, rich, tomato-based sauce. That kind of spaghetti is very good, with garlic bread and a green salad, and its offspring recipe is just as good and totally different, even improved. In fact you will find some people – I am one – who would argue that the best reason for making spaghetti is so, a couple of days later, you can make Spaghetti Casserole.
You want to make enough of the original spaghetti to have plenty left over. After dinner, if you haven't already tossed the sauce into the pasta, do so. You should have at least a pound of pasta and three cups of sauce to put into the refrigerator.
When you want Spaghetti Casserole, dump the cold left-over spaghetti on a chopping board and chop it roughly. Place it in a large mixing bowl and add a can of drained corn, a 4-oz. can of button mushrooms, a quarter-cup of canned, sliced jalapenos (or more, or less, as you prefer), and a can of whole black olives, with the olives cut in half. Pour into a greased casserole dish, sprinkle liberally with cheese, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.
If you have leftovers from this dish, it is great for breakfast, spread cold between slices of sourdough, but that's another story.
June 15, 2009
Media Literacy: Learning to see through the screen
Every time a pair of human eyes falls on a newspaper page, an ironic screen, as strange as it is ominous, slides automatically into place between the two. Strange, because it exists. Ominous, because of its power. Ironic, because of its source. Only a few people know it is there. The general public has no idea.
The screen conceals media codes that are embedded in the page. The same is true of whatever media your eyes are looking at: a television screen, a movie, or the pages of a magazine, or a book. The codes determine the design, content, delivery and effect of the media message, much the same as the rules of English determine the design, content, delivery and effect of an ordinary sentence.
With this code, the media can read you like a book. Media professionals use the code to create thousands of media products that are offered to the public every single day. From this blizzard, the public picks and chooses, without ever understanding why, the media products – from categories of information, entertainment, and manipulation – it wishes to consume.
Some of this content is necessary, indispensable in a democratic nation of free people. And some of it creates problems that cause the public great worry, such as "Hannah Montana." Children as young as four and five years old become swept up in media influences they don't understand, particularly influences to worship celebrities, both living and animated, to imitate their heroes and, most crucially, to buy things they are made to feel will bring them closer to their heroes.
Children and young adults, ages 4-18, become the financial backers (through their parents' wallets, routinely) of billion-dollar media industries, best exemplified by celebrity worship and professional sports, without the slightest idea of what is happening. This is not to say nobody should emulate stars or watch sports, which is fun and has emotional benefits, but fans should be at least provided with strategies used by media megabusinesses targeted at them, and some details about how it works.
Thousands of adults in America, never having received a day of media schooling, complain openly about media performance, and the deterioration of that performance in the last 20 years. Media-bashing is a primary activity in the blogosphere. True, much of it is blogoblather, but much of it is serious. The Project for Excellence in Journalism cites "growing skepticism about journalists, their companies and the news media as an institution."
The skeptics write letters to the editor like this one from my files, from a perfectly serious San Diegan named Stuart Jewell, which goes to the heart of the issue in a single sentence: “It’s strange to me, that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”
It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism, and all the other media forms, is as black-and-white as learning English. The media uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs.
This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they didn’t receive any media education in school. How can a consumer complain about the job the media is doing, with no idea of the rules the media uses to do its job?
Scariest of all, media consumers of all ages are being invited to become part of the 21st-century media, actual practitioners of the trade. If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to “open up” newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101. These are the principles that I want known to citizens in places where newspapers are introducing what they call “participatory journalism,” or “citizen journalism,” or what I call "macramé journalism." It scares me to read, in The New York Times, that such newspapers mean to become “a virtual town square, where citizens have a say in the news and where every reader is a reporter,” without some assurance that those readers are least are familiar with journalism principles that are older than the Constitution and are the bedrock for the First Amendment. I want to know if these macramé journalists have ever even heard of the media code.
Most of them haven't, even though the media code is no big secret. It is a relatively simple system of values, definitions and realities. You can learn it at any college or university that offers courses in journalism, marketing, public relations and advertising. I have known the code and have been using it in my work since 1969, as a reporter, columnist, essayist, author and educator. As a college educator, teaching journalism, I teach the code to more than 200 new students every school year. Practically all of them pass with ease.
It is only education, then, that keeps anyone from seeing and understanding the code. The screen, between the eyes and the subject, exists only because no one has taught the eyes how to see through it. Learning the media code is no different from learning algebra, except algebra is taught in American schools, and the media code is not. American children by the millions have graduated from its high schools with the algebra screen lifted, and the media code screen still in place. They are sent out to fly blind into lives that are informed, entertained, manipulated and shaped by daily blizzards of media code that they can’t see, and don’t understand.
It's best for all if the public knows what the media knows about this business relationship between the two. In this age, of all ages, the study of media code should not be confined to university journalism studies; it should be at least introduced in elementary school, and become a core curriculum class in every American high school.
Though that goal is not around the corner, the vital importance of making media literacy available to children in the digital world is attracting the attention of educators. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the News Literacy Project are two organizations working to bring media literacy studies into the public education curriculum. Says NAMLE: "Media literacy is a basic life skill for the 21st century. It is essential for a healthy democracy."
One of the NAMLE founders, Dr. Renee Hobbs of Temple University, in 2007 published a book, "Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English," a study of high school teachers who incorporated media analysis – journalism, television, movies, and Internet media – into the English curriculum. That is a logical step, and in the right direction, though understanding the media code might require a curriculum unto itself.
A non-profit organization called Common Sense Media, overseen and operated by a board and staff with impressive educational and professional pedigrees, is running a lively Website "dedicated to improving the media and entertainment lives of kids and families." Among their "Ten Common Sense Beliefs" is this one, No. 3: "We believe in teaching our kids to be savvy media interpreters – we can't cover their eyes but we can teach them to see."
All that is missing from that statement is the currency of media language, as it is spoken and employed in their work by media professionals and educators. When children – and adults – know the media code, they will have no problem reading the media the same way the media reads them: like a book. It starts with education. To change the media, change the audience.
That is the goal of this Monday Media Literacy series. When people learn to use the media code in reading the media, they take power back from the media. They pull back the curtain on the new Wizards of Oz. They become more informed consumers, whether the product is information, entertainment or manipulation. Informed consumers have the best chance to make choices they will feel good about. When the media Wizards start to realize that the consumers know the media code, know what is going on, it will move the media-public relationship toward a more honest balance of power. It can only happen with audience education, and accountability.
The screen conceals media codes that are embedded in the page. The same is true of whatever media your eyes are looking at: a television screen, a movie, or the pages of a magazine, or a book. The codes determine the design, content, delivery and effect of the media message, much the same as the rules of English determine the design, content, delivery and effect of an ordinary sentence.
With this code, the media can read you like a book. Media professionals use the code to create thousands of media products that are offered to the public every single day. From this blizzard, the public picks and chooses, without ever understanding why, the media products – from categories of information, entertainment, and manipulation – it wishes to consume.
Some of this content is necessary, indispensable in a democratic nation of free people. And some of it creates problems that cause the public great worry, such as "Hannah Montana." Children as young as four and five years old become swept up in media influences they don't understand, particularly influences to worship celebrities, both living and animated, to imitate their heroes and, most crucially, to buy things they are made to feel will bring them closer to their heroes.
Children and young adults, ages 4-18, become the financial backers (through their parents' wallets, routinely) of billion-dollar media industries, best exemplified by celebrity worship and professional sports, without the slightest idea of what is happening. This is not to say nobody should emulate stars or watch sports, which is fun and has emotional benefits, but fans should be at least provided with strategies used by media megabusinesses targeted at them, and some details about how it works.
Thousands of adults in America, never having received a day of media schooling, complain openly about media performance, and the deterioration of that performance in the last 20 years. Media-bashing is a primary activity in the blogosphere. True, much of it is blogoblather, but much of it is serious. The Project for Excellence in Journalism cites "growing skepticism about journalists, their companies and the news media as an institution."
The skeptics write letters to the editor like this one from my files, from a perfectly serious San Diegan named Stuart Jewell, which goes to the heart of the issue in a single sentence: “It’s strange to me, that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”
It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism, and all the other media forms, is as black-and-white as learning English. The media uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs.
This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they didn’t receive any media education in school. How can a consumer complain about the job the media is doing, with no idea of the rules the media uses to do its job?
Scariest of all, media consumers of all ages are being invited to become part of the 21st-century media, actual practitioners of the trade. If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to “open up” newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101. These are the principles that I want known to citizens in places where newspapers are introducing what they call “participatory journalism,” or “citizen journalism,” or what I call "macramé journalism." It scares me to read, in The New York Times, that such newspapers mean to become “a virtual town square, where citizens have a say in the news and where every reader is a reporter,” without some assurance that those readers are least are familiar with journalism principles that are older than the Constitution and are the bedrock for the First Amendment. I want to know if these macramé journalists have ever even heard of the media code.
Most of them haven't, even though the media code is no big secret. It is a relatively simple system of values, definitions and realities. You can learn it at any college or university that offers courses in journalism, marketing, public relations and advertising. I have known the code and have been using it in my work since 1969, as a reporter, columnist, essayist, author and educator. As a college educator, teaching journalism, I teach the code to more than 200 new students every school year. Practically all of them pass with ease.
It is only education, then, that keeps anyone from seeing and understanding the code. The screen, between the eyes and the subject, exists only because no one has taught the eyes how to see through it. Learning the media code is no different from learning algebra, except algebra is taught in American schools, and the media code is not. American children by the millions have graduated from its high schools with the algebra screen lifted, and the media code screen still in place. They are sent out to fly blind into lives that are informed, entertained, manipulated and shaped by daily blizzards of media code that they can’t see, and don’t understand.
It's best for all if the public knows what the media knows about this business relationship between the two. In this age, of all ages, the study of media code should not be confined to university journalism studies; it should be at least introduced in elementary school, and become a core curriculum class in every American high school.
Though that goal is not around the corner, the vital importance of making media literacy available to children in the digital world is attracting the attention of educators. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the News Literacy Project are two organizations working to bring media literacy studies into the public education curriculum. Says NAMLE: "Media literacy is a basic life skill for the 21st century. It is essential for a healthy democracy."
One of the NAMLE founders, Dr. Renee Hobbs of Temple University, in 2007 published a book, "Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English," a study of high school teachers who incorporated media analysis – journalism, television, movies, and Internet media – into the English curriculum. That is a logical step, and in the right direction, though understanding the media code might require a curriculum unto itself.
A non-profit organization called Common Sense Media, overseen and operated by a board and staff with impressive educational and professional pedigrees, is running a lively Website "dedicated to improving the media and entertainment lives of kids and families." Among their "Ten Common Sense Beliefs" is this one, No. 3: "We believe in teaching our kids to be savvy media interpreters – we can't cover their eyes but we can teach them to see."
All that is missing from that statement is the currency of media language, as it is spoken and employed in their work by media professionals and educators. When children – and adults – know the media code, they will have no problem reading the media the same way the media reads them: like a book. It starts with education. To change the media, change the audience.
That is the goal of this Monday Media Literacy series. When people learn to use the media code in reading the media, they take power back from the media. They pull back the curtain on the new Wizards of Oz. They become more informed consumers, whether the product is information, entertainment or manipulation. Informed consumers have the best chance to make choices they will feel good about. When the media Wizards start to realize that the consumers know the media code, know what is going on, it will move the media-public relationship toward a more honest balance of power. It can only happen with audience education, and accountability.
June 12, 2009
Archives: Championship and culmination
This is an excerpt from my 2004 book, "Warbirds – How They Played the Game," a story about how the 1954-57 Abilene High School Eagles became the "Team of the Century" in Texas high school football. The book, in my mind, began as a recreation of forgotten details about the Eagles' 49-game winning streak, but it quickly became a story about how they played the game. That's the only way to understand this excerpt, describing the 1955 Texas Class AAAA state championship game. "Moser" in the first graf is Abilene head coach Chuck Moser.
DECEMBER 17, 1955
During the week in the statewide media, Abilene was established as a one-touchdown favorite over Tyler, and the feeling was that it would be something like 21-14, based on the Eagles’ power to score. Moser himself felt that way. For several weeks he had been telling his coaches (but no one else) that the 1955 Eagles were the best offensive team he ever saw.
“If we can hold them to two touchdowns,” Moser told the Eagle Booster Club, “we’ll win, I believe.”
Abilene, in West Central Texas, and Tyler, way over in East Texas, had never met on a football field. They had some mutual adversaries in Waco, Wichita Falls and Dallas Highland Park, but their meeting at Amon Carter Stadium for the 1955 state championship would be their first.
Having won the Love Field coin toss, Abilene, as the home team, got to pick its jerseys. Moser told his team leader, quarterback David Bourland, that new white jerseys had arrived. Bourland quickly voted in favor of the old gold jerseys. The belly series depended on deception, particularly on the part of the quarterback, and Bourland had become very good at it. He always liked to wear the gold jerseys, because the ball was too easy to see against the white.
Moser had taught his quarterback a trick that made the belly option even more effective. Bourland walked into Moser’s office before the Lubbock game and the coach tossed him a deflated football from off his desk. “Pass it behind your back,” he said, and Bourland did, first right to left and then left to right. “Can you do that with a real ball?” Moser asked. “Sure,” Bourland said. In the game, when Bourland faked to the fullback, he then passed the ball behind his back, from right hand into left or vice-versa depending on the direction of the play, making the ball actually disappear for an instant. It was a very deceptive move. The Eagles’ dark gold jerseys with black numbers helped the illusion. So the Eagles would wear gold and Tyler would wear its white jerseys with shiny blue numbers.
Abilene and Tyler both had 12 straight victories against no defeats. In the playoffs, Tyler first defeated Corpus Christi Miller, 22-7, then Baytown, 20-0. Abilene had averaged 39 points a game, Tyler 29. The Eagles had surrendered 10 fewer points than the Lions, 77 to 87. Against their lone common opponent in 1955, Abilene had beaten Highland Park, 34-0, in the season opener; Tyler beat the Scotties, 33-13, in their next-to-last district game. Abilene’s scouts, Blacky Blackburn and Wally Bullington, told Moser the Lions were a great team. Moser told the Eagles they would have to do “everything right” to win.
The Lions were big and fast. Center Jim Davis and tackle Billy Sims both weighed 200 pounds and both were all-state candidates, as was 186-pound halfback Joe Leggette, who had 980 yards rushing. But the star of the team, and probably the best all-around high school football player of the 1955 season, was 6-2, 190-pound quarterback Charles Milstead.
“Another Walt Fondren,” Jack Holden wrote, “a Doyle Traylor,” comparing Milstead to star Southwest Conference quarterbacks of the era. Tyler ran the same belly option offense as Abilene, and Milstead’s ability to run or pass gave the Tyler system a dangerous extra option.
Members of Abilene’s state championship teams of 1923, 1928, 1931 and 1954 were special guests at the Friday pep rally. The team left for Fort Worth on the Eagle Bus right after the pep rally and headquartered at the Texas Hotel. More than 5,000 Abilenians made the 140-mile trip the next day, including almost 1,000 on a special Texas & Pacific train. The Victory Bell went in a truck and the 100-plus members of the Eagle Marching Band went in buses. After about 8 a.m., two-lane U.S. 80 was lined up with cars going east, through Baird, Cisco, Eastland and Ranger, streaming black and gold crepe decorations, headed for Fort Worth. About the same number of fans came from Tyler. Crowd estimates at kickoff went as high as 30,000 in the 37,000-seat stadium, meaning as many as 20,000 people from Fort Worth and other parts of the state came to the game. It promised to be a big game between two powerhouse teams, maybe even a classic. It turned out to be a classic, all right, one that had fans shaking their heads that afternoon and 45 years later.
In Fort Worth it was a beautiful Texas December afternoon for football, but windy. During warm-ups, the teams had trouble making the football stay on the kicking tee. Moser argued for taking the wind if Abilene won the coin toss. “I was afraid we might bog down and have to kick into that wind,” he said.
But his assistants talked him out of it. When they won the toss, Eagle co-captains Sam Caudle and Henry Colwell chose to receive. Then, disaster. Glynn Gregory had trouble fielding the opening kickoff and slipped on the badly worn turf and went down at the Abilene 5. Immediately five white shirts were around him. Tyler had come to play. “I really thought we were in trouble,” Moser said. So did everyone else. Tyler fans roared, Eagle fans caught their breath. This was a game in which breaks could make the difference.
The Eagles lined up at the 5 in the straight-T. On Moser teams, the quarterback called almost all of the plays. But to start the game, Moser sent the quarterback in with the first three or four plays. Abilene’s first play was a straight-ahead handoff to right halfback Henry Colwell. The line’s rule blocking for the play was also straight ahead. Colwell picked up five yards behind blocks by guard Sam Caudle, tackle Homer Rosenbaum and end Jerry Avery.
The second play had been created for this game. The Eagles never went into a game without some special play or strategy based on scouting reports. This play was designed to exploit the Tyler defensive line’s quickness and ability to penetrate. It also addressed the scouts’ assessment that most of Abilene’s plays should be run to the right side. In the Eagle playbook it was named “Tyler 4 Trap.” It began as the same straight-ahead dive, only to the left side, to Gregory. Bourland took the snap, pivoted left, and handed to Gregory, moving forward. The other backs, Colwell and fullback James Welch, sprinted to the left and the Tyler line and linebackers leaned toward that flow.
But as he took the handoff, Gregory cut sharply to the right. In front of him, left guard Stuart Peake had “pulled.” He had taken one step back and was now streaking across to block Lions’ left defensive tackle Tracy Webb who had in fact been allowed by Rosenbaum to penetrate across the line of scrimmage. Caudle and center Elmo Cure sealed off the inside, Peake hit the tackle square – in the next three minutes, Webb would see enough of Stuart Peake to last him several lifetimes – and the hole at right tackle was wide open. Leggette, rushing up from his defensive back position, almost got to Gregory but Avery cut him off.
Gregory veered outside, got two more blocks, and was off, up the sideline, for 48 yards. He was caught, amazingly, by a linebacker, attesting to Tyler’s team speed, but the Eagles were out of the hole. It was the biggest play of the game. “I know that stunned Tyler,” said Abilene assistant Bob Groseclose. “Those Tyler boys didn’t believe their big linemen could be moved that easily.”
First and 10 on the Tyler 42. Gregory went straight ahead for six yards. On second down, fullback James Welch ripped through the middle, a standard fullback trap play just off the center’s right hip, for 13 yards. Bourland ran the same play again and Welch got 15 more. Eagle blockers Cure, Caudle, Rosenbaum and Peake were chewing up the left side of Tyler’s defensive line and Peake, pulling on every play, was more or less dismembering Tracy Webb.
From the Tyler 8, Bourland faked the trap to Welch and handed to Gregory coming across, who followed yet another Peake block to the 3. Gregory carried again on the straightaway play to the 1, then Welch burst through cleanly on the trap play again for the touchdown.
On either side of the field, people didn’t quite know what to think. After a nerve-rattling start, the Eagles had moved 95 yards in eight plays, all of them rushes inside the tackles, and they did it in three minutes and seven seconds against the unbeaten Tyler Lions, who had allowed only one touchdown in the playoffs and only 87 points all season. On the field, the Lion players were shocked.
“They were twice as good as we thought they were,” said Milstead, a safety on defense. “We had no idea they were so terrific,” said all-state end Mickey Trimble. “They played like they knew they were going to win from the start.”
After a wind-blown kickoff, Tyler had the wind at its back and excellent field position at its 38. Two belly options and a fullback dive netted eight yards. Moser said line coach Hank Watkins “did a tremendous job with our line in setting the strategy to stop Tyler’s option stuff.” Defensive ends Peake and Guy Wells were coached to turn all of Tyler’s option plays inside. “Hank worked with those ends all week and really did a tremendous job,” Moser said.
Milstead punted and Gregory let the ball roll dead at the Eagle 10. Fifteen rushing plays later, the Eagles scored their second touchdown, on a four-yard sweep right by the fullback Welch. Milstead had a shot at him at the 2, but Welch muscled underneath the Tyler star and dived across the goal line just inside the corner flag with 43 seconds left in the first quarter. The key play in the drive came on third and six at the Eagle 14, after Abilene was penalized five yards for moving before the snap. Bourland faked to Welch up the middle, then waited for Gregory, who was circling around to the left, and thrust the ball into his belly. But then the quarterback pulled the ball out again and as defenders veered left toward Gregory Bourland took off around right end. He got a clearing block from Colwell and broke up the sideline for 18 yards and a drive-saving first down.
Tyler all-state center and linebacker Jim Davis thought that second drive broke Tyler’s back. “When they stopped us on our first drive and then they drove 90 yards for their second TD, we never could get going,” Davis said.
The first quarter ended. Abilene was leading, 13-0, and Tyler had run five offensive plays for a net of 11 yards. In the second quarter Colwell made a leaping interception of a Milstead pass at the Tyler 48 and returned it to the 25. Three plays and a penalty later, Abilene faced fourth and 25 from the Tyler 40, out of field goal range. The way his defense was playing, Moser didn’t mind running a play on fourth down from the opponent’s 40. He sent in a play to Bourland.
The Eagles came to the line in a flanker left, with Colwell lined up far outside left end Freddie Green. Bourland took the snap and dropped back. Welch moved to the right to pass block. Three white shirts surprisingly broke through and rushed toward Bourland. The first one reached him and hit him, but at that instant Bourland handed the ball to Gregory who had taken a couple of stutter steps to the left, then circled back and with perfect timing crossed behind Bourland for the handoff.
It was the Statue of Liberty play. Gregory took off to the right, his cleats kicking up chalk dust at the 50 as he turned upfield. The right side of the Eagle line sealed off Tyler defenders, while the left side had brush-blocked their defenders and then sprinted downfield. In front of Gregory was left tackle Rufus King. Gregory galloped across the 40, then the 30, with King five yards in front. At the 20, running at full speed, the 185-pound King hit Milstead with a block that knocked the 6-2, 190-pound Milstead five yards backward and to the ground at the 15. Behind King’s block, Gregory cut back across the field. Of the nine players near him, six wore gold jerseys. Green, racing across in front of Gregory, knocked down one defender who in turn rolled into a second Tyler back. Near the goal line, Colwell set up to screen off the last defender, who wasn’t going to catch Gregory anyway as he strode into the end zone.
The Eagle line of 1955 got downfield to block with a speed and intensity rarely seen at any level of competition on a football field, then or since. “They had terrific blocking,” said Tyler coach Buck Prejean, “by far better than we’ve faced this year.” “They had lots of speed,” said defensive back Joe Leggette, “but their blocking was the difference.” Gregory missed his second PAT in the strong wind and the Eagles took a 19-0 lead to halftime. They hadn’t thrown a pass.
“I told David to lay off throwing,” Moser said. “Heck, we could make five yards running our handoffs, so why risk passing? I’ve never seen as fine a blocking line in my life. We’d run a handoff on first down, and then we’d have second down and five to go, or three, or one. That kept the pressure on Tyler the entire game.”
Colwell, who was born in Tyler, scored the Eagles’ fourth touchdown on a one-yard run to climax a 45-yard drive late in the third quarter. Gregory closed out Abilene scoring with a four-yard run two minutes deep into the fourth quarter, and Abilene led, 33-0. In three quarters against Abilene’s first-team defense, Tyler had managed a total of two first downs. And Milstead looked nothing like the Charles Milstead that had led the Lions to 12 straight wins. Moser thought it was because of the pounding Milstead took while he was playing defense.
“We were sticking a helmet in his stomach on those blocks every play,” Moser said, “and that took a lot out of him. I know he didn’t look at all like he did in earlier games.” Specifically, Moser cited Rufus King’s block on Milstead during Gregory’s 40-yard scoring run in the second quarter.
In fact it was Ken Talkington, Tyler’s backup quarterback, who led the Lions to their first touchdown in the fourth quarter. Talkington threw a 33-yard scoring pass to Newell McCallum with 4:32 left in the game, and then Milstead came back to lead a short drive after a fumble recovery that ended with Leggette’s 10-yard TD run with 2:26 remaining. For the game, the Lions finished with 52 yards rushing and 80 passing, on five completions. Gregory had 171 of Abilene’s rushing total of 351. The Eagles tried only two passes, completing neither. “Abilene was brutal,” summarized the Associated Press.
Milstead, approached after the game by a young Tyler fan wanting an autograph, told the boy he should go get Abilene players to sign instead. “Everybody on that team was great,” Milstead said, “simply great.” He said the Lions “could play Abilene every day in the week and never beat ‘em.” “They hit hard and never let up,” said Trimble, the Tyler end. “They’d knock you down, and when you got back up, knock you down again. It was tough.” In the Eagle locker room, senior co-captains Caudle and Colwell were blubbering into their coach’s shoulder. They and the other seniors were the first class to play all three years under Moser.
“Coach, I can’t play any more,” said Caudle, a starter on both offense and defense for both the 1954 and ’55 champions, and a two-way all-district selection as a senior. “Sure you can, son,” Moser said. “You’ve got college games ahead.”
But that’s not what Caudle had meant. He couldn’t be an Eagle any more, part of a team that had won 23 straight games and a second state championship. It was a feeling of achievement and of belonging that might be part of this black and gold gang for a long while, with junior players like Gregory, Jimmy Carpenter, Stuart Peake and Rufus King in the room. It was not an easy thing for an 18-year-old to leave behind.
Culmination
In the days after the Tyler game, Jack Holden of the Reporter-News tried to get a handle on the Eagles’ greatness. “The Eagles’ ultimate success can be traced to several things,” he wrote, “and whether we have them in the right order or not we don’t know:
“1. Superior coaching (and we definitely think this comes first). Moser and his staff had every detail organized to perfection. There was little lost motion. The assistants did a terrific job. Moser gives them credit for doing most of the actual coaching, but it was his organization that made it possible.
“2. An unbeatable attitude by the boys themselves. Almost all the coaches have remarked repeatedly: ‘These kids want to be coached. We’ve never seen any boys as eager to learn.’ The boys studied hard and worked hard. They kept themselves in top condition.
“3. A good foundation in football. Abilene’s junior high coaches and even those in elementary school instilled in the Eagles a love of the game, a desire to learn and taught them good fundamentals. They just needed to be polished in high school.
“4. Teamwork On this team there was no star. All 11 were stars, and they worked as nearly like a unit as possible.
“5. Fine support from the city, the Eagle Booster Club and the students. All these groups went all out for their boys.”
Holden might have added a sixth element: time. Witnesses, coaches and media have routinely used the word “perfect” in describing the Abilene Eagles’ performance in the first half of the 1955 state championship game against Tyler.
Even Chuck Moser said it. “That game was something a coach lives for,” he said the day after the game. “Our first team played a perfect game all the way.”
It was the 23rd victory in the streak, but in history the Tyler game stands out from all the others. It was a culmination of all that had happened since the Friday the 13th meeting at which the Abilene School Board voted to offer Moser the job, and Moser accepted it, and the news was published on Valentine’s Day, 1953. All the mimeographed policies, all the coordination, all the teaching, all the drills, all the decisions, all the chalk talks, all the practices, all the eligibility slips, all the plays in practice, all the plays in the 35 previous games that Moser had coached the Eagles, all of it was practicing to be perfect, and it all came to 24 minutes of fruition in the first half of the 1955 state championship game.
From his first day in his 10-by-10 office in the old Eagles’ Nest on Peach St., Moser taught perfection. All that attention to detail was motivated by Moser’s desire to give his team its best chance to be perfect. That was always the goal, though Moser realized that some percentage of perfection, 75 or 80 percent, would provide his team a great advantage against its opposition. That advantage was obvious in the Tyler game. In the films, there is a glaring difference between the two teams. The Tyler players carried out their assignments, then stopped. The Abilene players carried out their assignments and kept running to the play and then ran back to the huddle.
Watching films of the 1955 Eagles, a person can start to wonder if the Eagles didn’t have 17 or 18 players on the field; 11 at the line of scrimmage, then after the play starts, another seven or eight downfield. A team could not be perfect unless it hustled until the whistle blew. You couldn’t be perfect if you didn’t play perfectly for every second of the game. Moser taught that from the first day of spring training in 1953, and people who were watching understood it immediately.
“We know one thing for sure,” Don Oliver of the Reporter-News wrote during those first spring training days, “win, lose, or draw, they’ll be the hustlingest ball club that has represented Abilene in a long time. Those that don’t hustle won’t play for Chuck Moser very long.”
But it took time to reach even a percentage of perfection, and three years to approach the sort of potential that the Eagles realized at Fort Worth. Expert witnesses to the Tyler game knew they had seen something climactic. Said Waco High School coach Carl Price: “Abilene’s state champions of this year are 30 points better than the 1954 champions. If they improve another 30 points next year, they might as well get in the Southwest Conference.”
“Abilene’s triumph was the most complete victory scored in championship play in 21 years,” wrote Dave Campbell of the Waco News-Tribune. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram was even more definitive: “There was general agreement among the long-time observers that Moser’s 1955 champions were the most powerful in the 35-year history of the Texas Interscholastic League. What made it a great team was the coiled-spring swiftness and the lightning reactions of the linemen, the versatility of the backfield which made every ball carrier a threat, and the tremendous defensive efforts in the clutches.”
Jack Stovall, an Abilenian living in Dallas, sent a telegram to the Reporter-News: “Have started rumor that Abilene High used star players from (Abilene colleges) Hardin-Simmons, McMurry and ACC against Tyler.” He had the right idea, but a weak concept: Abilene might in fact have beaten the collegians he mentioned. Nearer the mark was Hunter Schmidt, who covered the game for the Tyler Telegraph: “I’d give anyone Notre Dame and 14 points against Abilene.”
DECEMBER 17, 1955
During the week in the statewide media, Abilene was established as a one-touchdown favorite over Tyler, and the feeling was that it would be something like 21-14, based on the Eagles’ power to score. Moser himself felt that way. For several weeks he had been telling his coaches (but no one else) that the 1955 Eagles were the best offensive team he ever saw.
“If we can hold them to two touchdowns,” Moser told the Eagle Booster Club, “we’ll win, I believe.”
Abilene, in West Central Texas, and Tyler, way over in East Texas, had never met on a football field. They had some mutual adversaries in Waco, Wichita Falls and Dallas Highland Park, but their meeting at Amon Carter Stadium for the 1955 state championship would be their first.
Having won the Love Field coin toss, Abilene, as the home team, got to pick its jerseys. Moser told his team leader, quarterback David Bourland, that new white jerseys had arrived. Bourland quickly voted in favor of the old gold jerseys. The belly series depended on deception, particularly on the part of the quarterback, and Bourland had become very good at it. He always liked to wear the gold jerseys, because the ball was too easy to see against the white.
Moser had taught his quarterback a trick that made the belly option even more effective. Bourland walked into Moser’s office before the Lubbock game and the coach tossed him a deflated football from off his desk. “Pass it behind your back,” he said, and Bourland did, first right to left and then left to right. “Can you do that with a real ball?” Moser asked. “Sure,” Bourland said. In the game, when Bourland faked to the fullback, he then passed the ball behind his back, from right hand into left or vice-versa depending on the direction of the play, making the ball actually disappear for an instant. It was a very deceptive move. The Eagles’ dark gold jerseys with black numbers helped the illusion. So the Eagles would wear gold and Tyler would wear its white jerseys with shiny blue numbers.
Abilene and Tyler both had 12 straight victories against no defeats. In the playoffs, Tyler first defeated Corpus Christi Miller, 22-7, then Baytown, 20-0. Abilene had averaged 39 points a game, Tyler 29. The Eagles had surrendered 10 fewer points than the Lions, 77 to 87. Against their lone common opponent in 1955, Abilene had beaten Highland Park, 34-0, in the season opener; Tyler beat the Scotties, 33-13, in their next-to-last district game. Abilene’s scouts, Blacky Blackburn and Wally Bullington, told Moser the Lions were a great team. Moser told the Eagles they would have to do “everything right” to win.
The Lions were big and fast. Center Jim Davis and tackle Billy Sims both weighed 200 pounds and both were all-state candidates, as was 186-pound halfback Joe Leggette, who had 980 yards rushing. But the star of the team, and probably the best all-around high school football player of the 1955 season, was 6-2, 190-pound quarterback Charles Milstead.
“Another Walt Fondren,” Jack Holden wrote, “a Doyle Traylor,” comparing Milstead to star Southwest Conference quarterbacks of the era. Tyler ran the same belly option offense as Abilene, and Milstead’s ability to run or pass gave the Tyler system a dangerous extra option.
Members of Abilene’s state championship teams of 1923, 1928, 1931 and 1954 were special guests at the Friday pep rally. The team left for Fort Worth on the Eagle Bus right after the pep rally and headquartered at the Texas Hotel. More than 5,000 Abilenians made the 140-mile trip the next day, including almost 1,000 on a special Texas & Pacific train. The Victory Bell went in a truck and the 100-plus members of the Eagle Marching Band went in buses. After about 8 a.m., two-lane U.S. 80 was lined up with cars going east, through Baird, Cisco, Eastland and Ranger, streaming black and gold crepe decorations, headed for Fort Worth. About the same number of fans came from Tyler. Crowd estimates at kickoff went as high as 30,000 in the 37,000-seat stadium, meaning as many as 20,000 people from Fort Worth and other parts of the state came to the game. It promised to be a big game between two powerhouse teams, maybe even a classic. It turned out to be a classic, all right, one that had fans shaking their heads that afternoon and 45 years later.
In Fort Worth it was a beautiful Texas December afternoon for football, but windy. During warm-ups, the teams had trouble making the football stay on the kicking tee. Moser argued for taking the wind if Abilene won the coin toss. “I was afraid we might bog down and have to kick into that wind,” he said.
But his assistants talked him out of it. When they won the toss, Eagle co-captains Sam Caudle and Henry Colwell chose to receive. Then, disaster. Glynn Gregory had trouble fielding the opening kickoff and slipped on the badly worn turf and went down at the Abilene 5. Immediately five white shirts were around him. Tyler had come to play. “I really thought we were in trouble,” Moser said. So did everyone else. Tyler fans roared, Eagle fans caught their breath. This was a game in which breaks could make the difference.
The Eagles lined up at the 5 in the straight-T. On Moser teams, the quarterback called almost all of the plays. But to start the game, Moser sent the quarterback in with the first three or four plays. Abilene’s first play was a straight-ahead handoff to right halfback Henry Colwell. The line’s rule blocking for the play was also straight ahead. Colwell picked up five yards behind blocks by guard Sam Caudle, tackle Homer Rosenbaum and end Jerry Avery.
The second play had been created for this game. The Eagles never went into a game without some special play or strategy based on scouting reports. This play was designed to exploit the Tyler defensive line’s quickness and ability to penetrate. It also addressed the scouts’ assessment that most of Abilene’s plays should be run to the right side. In the Eagle playbook it was named “Tyler 4 Trap.” It began as the same straight-ahead dive, only to the left side, to Gregory. Bourland took the snap, pivoted left, and handed to Gregory, moving forward. The other backs, Colwell and fullback James Welch, sprinted to the left and the Tyler line and linebackers leaned toward that flow.
But as he took the handoff, Gregory cut sharply to the right. In front of him, left guard Stuart Peake had “pulled.” He had taken one step back and was now streaking across to block Lions’ left defensive tackle Tracy Webb who had in fact been allowed by Rosenbaum to penetrate across the line of scrimmage. Caudle and center Elmo Cure sealed off the inside, Peake hit the tackle square – in the next three minutes, Webb would see enough of Stuart Peake to last him several lifetimes – and the hole at right tackle was wide open. Leggette, rushing up from his defensive back position, almost got to Gregory but Avery cut him off.
Gregory veered outside, got two more blocks, and was off, up the sideline, for 48 yards. He was caught, amazingly, by a linebacker, attesting to Tyler’s team speed, but the Eagles were out of the hole. It was the biggest play of the game. “I know that stunned Tyler,” said Abilene assistant Bob Groseclose. “Those Tyler boys didn’t believe their big linemen could be moved that easily.”
First and 10 on the Tyler 42. Gregory went straight ahead for six yards. On second down, fullback James Welch ripped through the middle, a standard fullback trap play just off the center’s right hip, for 13 yards. Bourland ran the same play again and Welch got 15 more. Eagle blockers Cure, Caudle, Rosenbaum and Peake were chewing up the left side of Tyler’s defensive line and Peake, pulling on every play, was more or less dismembering Tracy Webb.
From the Tyler 8, Bourland faked the trap to Welch and handed to Gregory coming across, who followed yet another Peake block to the 3. Gregory carried again on the straightaway play to the 1, then Welch burst through cleanly on the trap play again for the touchdown.
On either side of the field, people didn’t quite know what to think. After a nerve-rattling start, the Eagles had moved 95 yards in eight plays, all of them rushes inside the tackles, and they did it in three minutes and seven seconds against the unbeaten Tyler Lions, who had allowed only one touchdown in the playoffs and only 87 points all season. On the field, the Lion players were shocked.
“They were twice as good as we thought they were,” said Milstead, a safety on defense. “We had no idea they were so terrific,” said all-state end Mickey Trimble. “They played like they knew they were going to win from the start.”
After a wind-blown kickoff, Tyler had the wind at its back and excellent field position at its 38. Two belly options and a fullback dive netted eight yards. Moser said line coach Hank Watkins “did a tremendous job with our line in setting the strategy to stop Tyler’s option stuff.” Defensive ends Peake and Guy Wells were coached to turn all of Tyler’s option plays inside. “Hank worked with those ends all week and really did a tremendous job,” Moser said.
Milstead punted and Gregory let the ball roll dead at the Eagle 10. Fifteen rushing plays later, the Eagles scored their second touchdown, on a four-yard sweep right by the fullback Welch. Milstead had a shot at him at the 2, but Welch muscled underneath the Tyler star and dived across the goal line just inside the corner flag with 43 seconds left in the first quarter. The key play in the drive came on third and six at the Eagle 14, after Abilene was penalized five yards for moving before the snap. Bourland faked to Welch up the middle, then waited for Gregory, who was circling around to the left, and thrust the ball into his belly. But then the quarterback pulled the ball out again and as defenders veered left toward Gregory Bourland took off around right end. He got a clearing block from Colwell and broke up the sideline for 18 yards and a drive-saving first down.
Tyler all-state center and linebacker Jim Davis thought that second drive broke Tyler’s back. “When they stopped us on our first drive and then they drove 90 yards for their second TD, we never could get going,” Davis said.
The first quarter ended. Abilene was leading, 13-0, and Tyler had run five offensive plays for a net of 11 yards. In the second quarter Colwell made a leaping interception of a Milstead pass at the Tyler 48 and returned it to the 25. Three plays and a penalty later, Abilene faced fourth and 25 from the Tyler 40, out of field goal range. The way his defense was playing, Moser didn’t mind running a play on fourth down from the opponent’s 40. He sent in a play to Bourland.
The Eagles came to the line in a flanker left, with Colwell lined up far outside left end Freddie Green. Bourland took the snap and dropped back. Welch moved to the right to pass block. Three white shirts surprisingly broke through and rushed toward Bourland. The first one reached him and hit him, but at that instant Bourland handed the ball to Gregory who had taken a couple of stutter steps to the left, then circled back and with perfect timing crossed behind Bourland for the handoff.
It was the Statue of Liberty play. Gregory took off to the right, his cleats kicking up chalk dust at the 50 as he turned upfield. The right side of the Eagle line sealed off Tyler defenders, while the left side had brush-blocked their defenders and then sprinted downfield. In front of Gregory was left tackle Rufus King. Gregory galloped across the 40, then the 30, with King five yards in front. At the 20, running at full speed, the 185-pound King hit Milstead with a block that knocked the 6-2, 190-pound Milstead five yards backward and to the ground at the 15. Behind King’s block, Gregory cut back across the field. Of the nine players near him, six wore gold jerseys. Green, racing across in front of Gregory, knocked down one defender who in turn rolled into a second Tyler back. Near the goal line, Colwell set up to screen off the last defender, who wasn’t going to catch Gregory anyway as he strode into the end zone.
The Eagle line of 1955 got downfield to block with a speed and intensity rarely seen at any level of competition on a football field, then or since. “They had terrific blocking,” said Tyler coach Buck Prejean, “by far better than we’ve faced this year.” “They had lots of speed,” said defensive back Joe Leggette, “but their blocking was the difference.” Gregory missed his second PAT in the strong wind and the Eagles took a 19-0 lead to halftime. They hadn’t thrown a pass.
“I told David to lay off throwing,” Moser said. “Heck, we could make five yards running our handoffs, so why risk passing? I’ve never seen as fine a blocking line in my life. We’d run a handoff on first down, and then we’d have second down and five to go, or three, or one. That kept the pressure on Tyler the entire game.”
Colwell, who was born in Tyler, scored the Eagles’ fourth touchdown on a one-yard run to climax a 45-yard drive late in the third quarter. Gregory closed out Abilene scoring with a four-yard run two minutes deep into the fourth quarter, and Abilene led, 33-0. In three quarters against Abilene’s first-team defense, Tyler had managed a total of two first downs. And Milstead looked nothing like the Charles Milstead that had led the Lions to 12 straight wins. Moser thought it was because of the pounding Milstead took while he was playing defense.
“We were sticking a helmet in his stomach on those blocks every play,” Moser said, “and that took a lot out of him. I know he didn’t look at all like he did in earlier games.” Specifically, Moser cited Rufus King’s block on Milstead during Gregory’s 40-yard scoring run in the second quarter.
In fact it was Ken Talkington, Tyler’s backup quarterback, who led the Lions to their first touchdown in the fourth quarter. Talkington threw a 33-yard scoring pass to Newell McCallum with 4:32 left in the game, and then Milstead came back to lead a short drive after a fumble recovery that ended with Leggette’s 10-yard TD run with 2:26 remaining. For the game, the Lions finished with 52 yards rushing and 80 passing, on five completions. Gregory had 171 of Abilene’s rushing total of 351. The Eagles tried only two passes, completing neither. “Abilene was brutal,” summarized the Associated Press.
Milstead, approached after the game by a young Tyler fan wanting an autograph, told the boy he should go get Abilene players to sign instead. “Everybody on that team was great,” Milstead said, “simply great.” He said the Lions “could play Abilene every day in the week and never beat ‘em.” “They hit hard and never let up,” said Trimble, the Tyler end. “They’d knock you down, and when you got back up, knock you down again. It was tough.” In the Eagle locker room, senior co-captains Caudle and Colwell were blubbering into their coach’s shoulder. They and the other seniors were the first class to play all three years under Moser.
“Coach, I can’t play any more,” said Caudle, a starter on both offense and defense for both the 1954 and ’55 champions, and a two-way all-district selection as a senior. “Sure you can, son,” Moser said. “You’ve got college games ahead.”
But that’s not what Caudle had meant. He couldn’t be an Eagle any more, part of a team that had won 23 straight games and a second state championship. It was a feeling of achievement and of belonging that might be part of this black and gold gang for a long while, with junior players like Gregory, Jimmy Carpenter, Stuart Peake and Rufus King in the room. It was not an easy thing for an 18-year-old to leave behind.
Culmination
In the days after the Tyler game, Jack Holden of the Reporter-News tried to get a handle on the Eagles’ greatness. “The Eagles’ ultimate success can be traced to several things,” he wrote, “and whether we have them in the right order or not we don’t know:
“1. Superior coaching (and we definitely think this comes first). Moser and his staff had every detail organized to perfection. There was little lost motion. The assistants did a terrific job. Moser gives them credit for doing most of the actual coaching, but it was his organization that made it possible.
“2. An unbeatable attitude by the boys themselves. Almost all the coaches have remarked repeatedly: ‘These kids want to be coached. We’ve never seen any boys as eager to learn.’ The boys studied hard and worked hard. They kept themselves in top condition.
“3. A good foundation in football. Abilene’s junior high coaches and even those in elementary school instilled in the Eagles a love of the game, a desire to learn and taught them good fundamentals. They just needed to be polished in high school.
“4. Teamwork On this team there was no star. All 11 were stars, and they worked as nearly like a unit as possible.
“5. Fine support from the city, the Eagle Booster Club and the students. All these groups went all out for their boys.”
Holden might have added a sixth element: time. Witnesses, coaches and media have routinely used the word “perfect” in describing the Abilene Eagles’ performance in the first half of the 1955 state championship game against Tyler.
Even Chuck Moser said it. “That game was something a coach lives for,” he said the day after the game. “Our first team played a perfect game all the way.”
It was the 23rd victory in the streak, but in history the Tyler game stands out from all the others. It was a culmination of all that had happened since the Friday the 13th meeting at which the Abilene School Board voted to offer Moser the job, and Moser accepted it, and the news was published on Valentine’s Day, 1953. All the mimeographed policies, all the coordination, all the teaching, all the drills, all the decisions, all the chalk talks, all the practices, all the eligibility slips, all the plays in practice, all the plays in the 35 previous games that Moser had coached the Eagles, all of it was practicing to be perfect, and it all came to 24 minutes of fruition in the first half of the 1955 state championship game.
From his first day in his 10-by-10 office in the old Eagles’ Nest on Peach St., Moser taught perfection. All that attention to detail was motivated by Moser’s desire to give his team its best chance to be perfect. That was always the goal, though Moser realized that some percentage of perfection, 75 or 80 percent, would provide his team a great advantage against its opposition. That advantage was obvious in the Tyler game. In the films, there is a glaring difference between the two teams. The Tyler players carried out their assignments, then stopped. The Abilene players carried out their assignments and kept running to the play and then ran back to the huddle.
Watching films of the 1955 Eagles, a person can start to wonder if the Eagles didn’t have 17 or 18 players on the field; 11 at the line of scrimmage, then after the play starts, another seven or eight downfield. A team could not be perfect unless it hustled until the whistle blew. You couldn’t be perfect if you didn’t play perfectly for every second of the game. Moser taught that from the first day of spring training in 1953, and people who were watching understood it immediately.
“We know one thing for sure,” Don Oliver of the Reporter-News wrote during those first spring training days, “win, lose, or draw, they’ll be the hustlingest ball club that has represented Abilene in a long time. Those that don’t hustle won’t play for Chuck Moser very long.”
But it took time to reach even a percentage of perfection, and three years to approach the sort of potential that the Eagles realized at Fort Worth. Expert witnesses to the Tyler game knew they had seen something climactic. Said Waco High School coach Carl Price: “Abilene’s state champions of this year are 30 points better than the 1954 champions. If they improve another 30 points next year, they might as well get in the Southwest Conference.”
“Abilene’s triumph was the most complete victory scored in championship play in 21 years,” wrote Dave Campbell of the Waco News-Tribune. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram was even more definitive: “There was general agreement among the long-time observers that Moser’s 1955 champions were the most powerful in the 35-year history of the Texas Interscholastic League. What made it a great team was the coiled-spring swiftness and the lightning reactions of the linemen, the versatility of the backfield which made every ball carrier a threat, and the tremendous defensive efforts in the clutches.”
Jack Stovall, an Abilenian living in Dallas, sent a telegram to the Reporter-News: “Have started rumor that Abilene High used star players from (Abilene colleges) Hardin-Simmons, McMurry and ACC against Tyler.” He had the right idea, but a weak concept: Abilene might in fact have beaten the collegians he mentioned. Nearer the mark was Hunter Schmidt, who covered the game for the Tyler Telegraph: “I’d give anyone Notre Dame and 14 points against Abilene.”
June 11, 2009
Stretch Cooking: The technique for thangs
I made corn bread thangs earlier this week for the first time in a long time, and it was a good reminder of how the simplest cooking techniques require practice, care, and, preferably, frequent repetition. Yes, Virginia, cooking a good corn bread thang IS like using a computer, or playing a piano. You don't want to let the principles gather dust, and the technique get rusty.
Hence a thang conundrum. I don't make thangs regularly, like I used to, because I can't eat them regularly, like I used to. Thirty years ago, a nice plate would be meat, pinto beans, sliced tomatoes and red onion, and six corn bread thangs. Those were the days, and I miss them. The other night, I had two thangs, with some leftover carnitas, some beans, and the famous black gravy. I could have gone a third, I guess, but it's just not a good habit.
I call them "thangs" because that's what my grandmother Susie called them. They are the essence of stretch cooking, going to the heart of survival, which during the Depression could be long stretches of beans, meal, and grit. All you needed then was water and a fire. I was not born until 1943, but growing up in Abilene, four blocks from the Texas & Pacific tracks, I would see hungry men all the time. I vividly remember seeing a man with a paper sack, and in the sack he had potatoes, some flour, and lard, and he was happy as a king. Other men would come to our back door – our house was "marked" by the hoboes – and Susie would always have something for them.
Inside, at our own table, I simply thought this crispy, savory corn bread was one of the best things I could put in my mouth. And it was great for pushing around beans, greens, and pot liquor, and slowly the pot liquor would seep into the dense, moist, mealy centers. I will be frank with you: you either like corn bread thangs, or you don't. They are like hoecakes, or pone, only denser, and crispier on the outside. One rule: you have to eat all the thangs as they come out of the skillet. If they get cold, you cannot successfully reheat them. You could freeze them and throw them at burglars, but that's about it.
Here is the technique. Put a cup or two of cornmeal in a bowl and season with salt and pepper, and some garlic powder if you like. Bring to a boil – really boiling – a pan of water. When you're ready, pour some of the water – not too much – into the cornmeal and stir with a fork. The meal will start to bind. Keep adding water, a little at a time, until the mix loses its graininess and forms into a thick, steaming mush.
Pour out the hot water and replace it with cold. Dip your hands into the cold water, then fork up a fat palmful of mush. Form it into a patty about three-quarters of an inch thick and about three inches across. Then, with your hands at right angles, press finger marks into either side of the thang. The ridges will then get crispy in the fat, and the hollows in between will be more tender, and not let the melted butter run off.
Make as many patties as you have mush, dipping your hands, and actually rinsing them, each time in the cold water. It keeps your fingers cool and slick, so the mush will handle easily and not be sticky. When the patties are made, using a fork, slip them into a half-inch of hot oil in a skillet. Don't crowd them. When the edges are golden and crispy, carefully turn them over. Fry the second side for a minute or two, lifting them with a fork to check for the golden, crispy look. Drain on paper towels or newspaper and serve immediately.
My two turned out okay, but did not have the exact crunchiness that a good thang always has. I left the mush a bit too grainy, but didn't have the old confidence, being out of practice, to add another splash of hot water. If you add too much water, the mush gets too thin and won't hold a shape. At that point, you have to start over, or serve the mush as polenta. It's the same thing.
Hence a thang conundrum. I don't make thangs regularly, like I used to, because I can't eat them regularly, like I used to. Thirty years ago, a nice plate would be meat, pinto beans, sliced tomatoes and red onion, and six corn bread thangs. Those were the days, and I miss them. The other night, I had two thangs, with some leftover carnitas, some beans, and the famous black gravy. I could have gone a third, I guess, but it's just not a good habit.
I call them "thangs" because that's what my grandmother Susie called them. They are the essence of stretch cooking, going to the heart of survival, which during the Depression could be long stretches of beans, meal, and grit. All you needed then was water and a fire. I was not born until 1943, but growing up in Abilene, four blocks from the Texas & Pacific tracks, I would see hungry men all the time. I vividly remember seeing a man with a paper sack, and in the sack he had potatoes, some flour, and lard, and he was happy as a king. Other men would come to our back door – our house was "marked" by the hoboes – and Susie would always have something for them.
Inside, at our own table, I simply thought this crispy, savory corn bread was one of the best things I could put in my mouth. And it was great for pushing around beans, greens, and pot liquor, and slowly the pot liquor would seep into the dense, moist, mealy centers. I will be frank with you: you either like corn bread thangs, or you don't. They are like hoecakes, or pone, only denser, and crispier on the outside. One rule: you have to eat all the thangs as they come out of the skillet. If they get cold, you cannot successfully reheat them. You could freeze them and throw them at burglars, but that's about it.
Here is the technique. Put a cup or two of cornmeal in a bowl and season with salt and pepper, and some garlic powder if you like. Bring to a boil – really boiling – a pan of water. When you're ready, pour some of the water – not too much – into the cornmeal and stir with a fork. The meal will start to bind. Keep adding water, a little at a time, until the mix loses its graininess and forms into a thick, steaming mush.
Pour out the hot water and replace it with cold. Dip your hands into the cold water, then fork up a fat palmful of mush. Form it into a patty about three-quarters of an inch thick and about three inches across. Then, with your hands at right angles, press finger marks into either side of the thang. The ridges will then get crispy in the fat, and the hollows in between will be more tender, and not let the melted butter run off.
Make as many patties as you have mush, dipping your hands, and actually rinsing them, each time in the cold water. It keeps your fingers cool and slick, so the mush will handle easily and not be sticky. When the patties are made, using a fork, slip them into a half-inch of hot oil in a skillet. Don't crowd them. When the edges are golden and crispy, carefully turn them over. Fry the second side for a minute or two, lifting them with a fork to check for the golden, crispy look. Drain on paper towels or newspaper and serve immediately.
My two turned out okay, but did not have the exact crunchiness that a good thang always has. I left the mush a bit too grainy, but didn't have the old confidence, being out of practice, to add another splash of hot water. If you add too much water, the mush gets too thin and won't hold a shape. At that point, you have to start over, or serve the mush as polenta. It's the same thing.
June 09, 2009
A Thang for Black Gravy
I guess I didn't realize it, but Tom Perini has definitely gone viral. I was so impressed last week when Paula Deen on TV picked him as the king of Texas brisket barbecue, and when he gave her a sample, she kissed him FULL ON THE LIPS.
Then, today, I became aware of the new issue of Saveur magazine ("Savor a World of Authentic Cuisine"), with its cover story, "Twenty-Four Reasons Why We Love Texas."
No. 5: Tom Perini. If you missed my groveling blog about Tom last week, he and I grew up together (I was a year older) in Abilene, Texas, so I can truly say, "I knew him when."
A newer acquaintance, via the blogosphere, is Lisa Fain, a Texas native living in New York City, who does the "Homesick Texan" food blog. She has an essay in the new Saveur, which is how I came to know about the magazine in the first place. She also has at her site a recipe for carnitas, which I tried Sunday, which was the original starting place for this blog, until I looked at Saveur online and saw Tom Perini at No. 5 statewide.
The carnitas came out very nicely and there turned out to be a bonus. The recipe says to let the carnitas brown in its own fat, which has rendered out earlier in the recipe, and to stir the meat frequently so it doesn't stick to the pot. I didn't stir it regularly enough, and then I forgot to stir it at all, so when I came back, the pork was fine, but in the bottom of the pot was a dark layer that the chemists would call a tight lattice of fat, blood and sugar molecules forged by heat into an impenetrable mass.
And so a circle closed. When I was growing up, in Abilene, Texas, alongside Tom Perini, who at the time appeared deceptively ordinary, my grandmother Susie knew two ways to cook meat: well-done and weller-done. I loved the black objects she brought to the table, whether it was meatloaf, pork chops, or pot roast. They may have been chewier than most, but they also provided a unique intensity of meat flavor that I have never forgotten.
So I looked at the mahogany slag in the bottom of my pot after dinner on Sunday and saw opportunity. I turned the heat to medium-low and poured in a cup of water with a couple tablespoons of vinegar, and I let the liquid get steamy, and then I started to scratch at the slag with a spatula, gently scratching and probing, like an archaeologist. My goal was the black gravy that I remember gathered beneath Susie's roasts. It took about 15 minutes, but then I was able to pour a couple of cups of black gravy into a plastic container with the leftover carnitas.
All day yesterday, I was looking forward to dinner. I knew from experience that there was only one satisfactory accompaniment for the black gravy, and that was another Susie specialty, corn bread thangs. The thangs would be a bit of trouble, and hideously caloric, and during the afternoon I considered rice, or potatoes, or white bread, but I knew all the while what the deal was. I put the carnitas and black gravy in a saucepan to warm up, and I made a couple of big thangs, which are only cornmeal, salt and pepper, bound into patties with hot water and fried golden-crispy in oil. A good thang is crispy on the outside, steamy on the inside, and remarkably dense. If you let a corn bread thang get cold, you can drive nails with it. It was this density that the gravy's own flavor density required.
Karen walked past, pinched off a bite of warm, gravy-painted pork from the saucepan, ate it, and exclaimed in a rapturous tone how good it was, and I smiled at this latest evidence that I had married the right woman. But she only wanted a bite. I poured the gravy over the thangs, with some beans and the carnitas on the side. It wasn't a plate you would see a picture of in Saveur, but it sure was good, and totally Texan.
Then, today, I became aware of the new issue of Saveur magazine ("Savor a World of Authentic Cuisine"), with its cover story, "Twenty-Four Reasons Why We Love Texas."
No. 5: Tom Perini. If you missed my groveling blog about Tom last week, he and I grew up together (I was a year older) in Abilene, Texas, so I can truly say, "I knew him when."
A newer acquaintance, via the blogosphere, is Lisa Fain, a Texas native living in New York City, who does the "Homesick Texan" food blog. She has an essay in the new Saveur, which is how I came to know about the magazine in the first place. She also has at her site a recipe for carnitas, which I tried Sunday, which was the original starting place for this blog, until I looked at Saveur online and saw Tom Perini at No. 5 statewide.
The carnitas came out very nicely and there turned out to be a bonus. The recipe says to let the carnitas brown in its own fat, which has rendered out earlier in the recipe, and to stir the meat frequently so it doesn't stick to the pot. I didn't stir it regularly enough, and then I forgot to stir it at all, so when I came back, the pork was fine, but in the bottom of the pot was a dark layer that the chemists would call a tight lattice of fat, blood and sugar molecules forged by heat into an impenetrable mass.
And so a circle closed. When I was growing up, in Abilene, Texas, alongside Tom Perini, who at the time appeared deceptively ordinary, my grandmother Susie knew two ways to cook meat: well-done and weller-done. I loved the black objects she brought to the table, whether it was meatloaf, pork chops, or pot roast. They may have been chewier than most, but they also provided a unique intensity of meat flavor that I have never forgotten.
So I looked at the mahogany slag in the bottom of my pot after dinner on Sunday and saw opportunity. I turned the heat to medium-low and poured in a cup of water with a couple tablespoons of vinegar, and I let the liquid get steamy, and then I started to scratch at the slag with a spatula, gently scratching and probing, like an archaeologist. My goal was the black gravy that I remember gathered beneath Susie's roasts. It took about 15 minutes, but then I was able to pour a couple of cups of black gravy into a plastic container with the leftover carnitas.
All day yesterday, I was looking forward to dinner. I knew from experience that there was only one satisfactory accompaniment for the black gravy, and that was another Susie specialty, corn bread thangs. The thangs would be a bit of trouble, and hideously caloric, and during the afternoon I considered rice, or potatoes, or white bread, but I knew all the while what the deal was. I put the carnitas and black gravy in a saucepan to warm up, and I made a couple of big thangs, which are only cornmeal, salt and pepper, bound into patties with hot water and fried golden-crispy in oil. A good thang is crispy on the outside, steamy on the inside, and remarkably dense. If you let a corn bread thang get cold, you can drive nails with it. It was this density that the gravy's own flavor density required.
Karen walked past, pinched off a bite of warm, gravy-painted pork from the saucepan, ate it, and exclaimed in a rapturous tone how good it was, and I smiled at this latest evidence that I had married the right woman. But she only wanted a bite. I poured the gravy over the thangs, with some beans and the carnitas on the side. It wasn't a plate you would see a picture of in Saveur, but it sure was good, and totally Texan.
June 08, 2009
Media Literacy: Tracy Clark, reporter, at work
The next time you read a story in the newspaper, look at the reporter's name, called the byline, at the top of the story. Let's say the reporter's name is Tracy Clark.
Tracy Clark considers you a best friend. In fact, you are the reporter's hero. Reporters have been taught to think of readers that way since their first semester of journalism school. Tracy is now a veteran reporter with 20 years of experience, and this morning he has a new story for you. He has been thinking about you since he started work on this story. Now, here he is, running toward you, somewhat out of breath, his eyes excited, lines of sweat on his cheeks. The more exciting the story, the more excited he is.
"Guess what!" he says. "What?!" you ask.
And then he tells you what happened. He gives you the first sentence of the story: who won a baseball game, a city council vote, a far-off devastating earthquake, a good (or bad) day on Wall Street, a medical discovery, an investigative story on lobbyists.
"No kidding!" you say, and then you ask your friend Tracy a question. The question is the first thing you want to know about the story, the most important first information you need that will explain what happened.
Tracy will answer. His response is the second paragraph in the story. Knowing that answer, you ask the next-most important question in your mind. He answers that; it is his third paragraph in the story. And so it goes: your questions, his answers, in your logical order of interest, until you have no more questions about the story.
That is the relationship, precisely, between a reader and a reporter. Unless it is a scheduled event (a stadium, a rally, a royal marriage), the reader has very little chance of experiencing the news first-hand, say, in an entourage following a president on a trip to Cairo. The growth of television and global communications, symbolized so dramatically by CNN, sometimes empowers readers to witness distant news as it is happening: 9/11, the "shock and awe" attacks in Iraq, a shuttle disaster, a Katrina, a Super Bowl, the World Series. Because of their onboard reaction package, humans are eager consumers of news happening before their eyes. The famous "white Bronco" slow-speed pursuit of O.J. Simpson along Los Angeles freeways drew 90 million viewers, a Super Bowl-sized number.
But most news, even big news, happens away from the reader's view. And so the reader says to Tracy Clark, "Go get me the news," and hands over his reaction package, the ancient definitions and values of news that constitute the heart of the media code. Of course the reader remains blithely unaware of the transaction. Do you see the totality of the irony? In the media literacy gap in America, the media code is a secret hiding in plain sight. That may be in part because reported news looks so different from news as it is happening. It is also in part because the public is reluctant to admit its attraction to media displays of conflict, disaster, prominence, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity. And demographics play a part, when specific groups with specific interests take exception to how editors democratize the news on any given day (see "What is News?").
Meanwhile, the Tracy Clarks have the tools necessary to complete their tasks, both in the field as they collect information for the story, and at their computers, as they analyze all that information, assimilate it into clear thinking, and then organize it into a story. Tracy uses a media code toolbox similar to the "reaction package," but including other tools essential to his craft.
Throughout the reporter's work with the toolbox, the reader remains his hero. Tracy, doing the work, is constantly aware of the reader looking over his shoulder. The reader has priorities. The first is accuracy. Thus accuracy, though it is an impossible goal, becomes the cardinal rule of journalism. Tracy has made mistakes in his 20-year career, and he remembers them more clearly than all the good stuff he has done, because accuracy is a matter of credibility. His workable goal is to minimize mistakes, of fact, of spelling, of grammar, of punctuation. He hasn't made many. His rule: when in doubt, check it out.
The reader's second priority is complete, objective content. Tracy must provide answers to all the questions the reader may have about the story. When he feels the story is finished, from both sides, Tracy will actually ask himself: "Will the reader have any questions about this story that I have left unanswered?" If Tracy's answer to that question is, "No," then the story is finished. If the answer is, "Yes," Tracy has some more work to do. Remember the guess-what scenario; Tracy will keep answering until you have no more questions about the story.
In many stories, all the questions can't be answered, because Tracy can't get them. Reporters must attribute all information to authorities or sources; the reader should never be under the impression that the information is coming from the reporter, unless it is a first-hand account such as a reporter covering a baseball game (and even then, only the players and managers can answer some questions). Routinely, authorities can't provide answers, usually concerning the fifth W: Why? Why did the Air France plane crash? When those answers are known, Tracy will write a new story.
When he feels that he has all the answers, Tracy will have a few pages of notes or tapes, if it is a simple story, or many pages, with other documents, if it is a big, complex story, that he must organize into files before he even thinks of writing the story. Imagine the files compiled by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post in their series of stories about Watergate that resulted in the resignation from office of a sitting United States president. Imagine the files accumulated in answering the Why of 9/11. Throughout, Tracy has relied on the media code to guide his search. Remember, he is your proxy when he asks authorities for the answers he needs to bring you the story.
When Tracy's reporting work is complete – well, let's pause for a clarification. "Reporting" actually means collecting information. When that work is completed, the reporter sits down to write the story. Most of the time, stories are written on deadline. The simplest expression of deadlines is to picture the reporter in Abilene, Texas, a city of about 100,000 population, covering a Friday night football game for The Reporter-News. The paper prints only one edition, and Tracy's deadline is 11:30 p.m. (At large metropolitan newspapers, there will be later deadlines, as many as five or six, depending on the number of editions printed, and before the night is done, depending on when the game ends, Tracy may have written six versions of the story.)
In Abilene, the game ends at 10:15. Tracy leaves the pressbox, sprints down the stadium steps to the locker rooms for some quotes he knows you will want, and by 10:45 is back in the pressbox. He has 45 minutes to finish and file his story. In front of him are pages of notes and scribbled quotes. These he will analyze, assimilate, and organize, and write the story, which typically run 750-1,000 words for a high school football game in Texas.
At no other moment in the process is the media code more essential than in these next 45 minutes. The values and definitions, and other codes, de-mystify his task, no matter if the story is a football game, a Senate debate, or a hotel fire. He scans the information, looking for news. What is news? It's in the code: anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. He finds four bites of information that satisfy the definition. In the trade, these are called "features." A feature is the news; it is what the story is about. The rest of the information is details, and details explain features.
Next, Tracy determines: what kind of story is it? He makes the determination using the 5 W's and the 12 event values, scoring each in the story on their individual strength scale of 1-10. (Next time you read a football game story, score it yourself for the presence of the 12 values. Hint: proximity will score high if your team wins, and low if it loses.) As soon as this step is finished, Tracy can start, in his head, working on the lede. At this moment, with 35 minutes left, Tracy is furiously multi-tasking. He is working on the lede, he is grouping together features with the details that explain them, he is editing details, and he is starting to arrange the features and details into logical order.
The lede, a spelling of "lead" unique to journalism, is the first paragraph of the story, one clear and hopefully provocative sentence that tells the reader what the story is about. It is Tracy's "Guess what!" line. Editing details is a process of choosing the details that must be in the story (to answer all the reader's questions) and which details can be left out. Logical order is arranging the features and details in logical order of importance, from most important – the lede – to auxiliary details in the last paragraphs that may not even make it into the paper. Who tells Tracy, there in the pressbox, working at 110 miles per hour, what logical order is? You do.
This design of lede, edited details and logical order, is the famous inverted pyramid. Unlike the values and definitions, the pyramid did not originate with the public, but it exists today because the public approved it. The media actually created the inverted pyramid and introduced it into the media code at the time of the Civil War, 1861-65. Reporters had available a new technology, the telegraph, to send their stories back to their newspapers from the battlefields. Instead of days or weeks in the pouches of couriers, stories could be telegraphed to appear in newspapers overnight. This new speed was one of the four true revolutions in media history.
But there was a catch. Civil War correspondents wrote their stories in the only composition style they knew: the ages-old narrative, story-telling style typified today by novels, TV dramas, and movies. This design presented information in chronological order, and included many details for interest. The story developed slowly, to create drama, and the climax was at the end. Readers of the day had no cause to object to these 2,000-3,000-word stories.
The problem was access. In the 19th century, operating a mobile telegraph in wartime presented considerable logistics problems. Reporters found themselves lining up to use the same machine. Sending a narrative-style story required considerable time, and the line of reporters waiting their turn outside grew combative. Before long, the military officer in charge of the telegraph was agreeing to limit time on the machine and kicking the reporter out. "But," cried The New York Times, "I'm not even halfway through! I haven't told them who won yet!" Out he went, anyway, and in came the next reporter.
Under the circumstances, the reporters learned very quickly to flip their stories over – thus, the inverted pyramid – put the climax first, edit details to save transmission time, and send the story in logical order, so that nothing in the story after the officer cut it off was more important than any information that came before. In 1865, the Civil War ended, and reporters had no more need for the inverted pyramid. But it survived, and survives today, for one reason only: the reader liked it. It made the reader an editor. He could still read the whole, now condensed, story. But, in time, the reader learned that he or she didn't have to read the entire story to get the news. He could read five paragraphs, or seven, know he had the story's most important facts, and go to the next story. This is the way millions of Americans read the newspaper every morning.
When Tracy finishes his story at 11:29.50, and sends it, the story will pass under two and perhaps three sets of eyes before it is set into the page: the sports editor (or assistant editor working nights) and copy editors. These worthies edit the story with you-know-who in mind (when I edit, I actually imagine myself at home, reading the story in the newspaper). Copy editors, by the way, write the story's headline. Reporters DO NOT write headlines.
I need to acknowledge that what you have just read is an account of the media code's role in classic journalism since the mid-nineteenth century. More than 140 years later, the media code remains the heart of journalism. Journalism's body, however has changed radically. Television news has required reporters to condense stories to fit an average broadcast delivery speed of 140 words per minute, at a price of loss of story content and depth. Starting in the 1970s, television's evening news programs, both national and local, essentially killed the circulation, and eventually the existence of, evening newspapers. Business aspects, particularly corporate ownership, have exerted dangerous cost-cutting and political pressure on objective news operations. Internet news and information operations, with 24/7 deadlines, ridiculously low overhead, and a revolutionary business model, prompt media analysts to portray traditional news organizations – newspapers, certainly, but also television news – as dinosaurs lumbering toward the final abyss.
The traditional organizations are scrambling and struggling to adapt the Internet model, and those struggles are outside the scope of this Media Literacy series, except when journalism's 21st-century body seeks to reject the heart. Many online versions of newspapers and several all-online operations such as The Huffington Post, invite – nay, encourage – the participation of what they call "citizen journalists." Unless these participants are at lease as conversant as Tracy Clark in the media code, then they are not "citizen journalists" at all, but what I call "macramé journalists," or, worse, paperazzi.
Tracy Clark considers you a best friend. In fact, you are the reporter's hero. Reporters have been taught to think of readers that way since their first semester of journalism school. Tracy is now a veteran reporter with 20 years of experience, and this morning he has a new story for you. He has been thinking about you since he started work on this story. Now, here he is, running toward you, somewhat out of breath, his eyes excited, lines of sweat on his cheeks. The more exciting the story, the more excited he is.
"Guess what!" he says. "What?!" you ask.
And then he tells you what happened. He gives you the first sentence of the story: who won a baseball game, a city council vote, a far-off devastating earthquake, a good (or bad) day on Wall Street, a medical discovery, an investigative story on lobbyists.
"No kidding!" you say, and then you ask your friend Tracy a question. The question is the first thing you want to know about the story, the most important first information you need that will explain what happened.
Tracy will answer. His response is the second paragraph in the story. Knowing that answer, you ask the next-most important question in your mind. He answers that; it is his third paragraph in the story. And so it goes: your questions, his answers, in your logical order of interest, until you have no more questions about the story.
That is the relationship, precisely, between a reader and a reporter. Unless it is a scheduled event (a stadium, a rally, a royal marriage), the reader has very little chance of experiencing the news first-hand, say, in an entourage following a president on a trip to Cairo. The growth of television and global communications, symbolized so dramatically by CNN, sometimes empowers readers to witness distant news as it is happening: 9/11, the "shock and awe" attacks in Iraq, a shuttle disaster, a Katrina, a Super Bowl, the World Series. Because of their onboard reaction package, humans are eager consumers of news happening before their eyes. The famous "white Bronco" slow-speed pursuit of O.J. Simpson along Los Angeles freeways drew 90 million viewers, a Super Bowl-sized number.
But most news, even big news, happens away from the reader's view. And so the reader says to Tracy Clark, "Go get me the news," and hands over his reaction package, the ancient definitions and values of news that constitute the heart of the media code. Of course the reader remains blithely unaware of the transaction. Do you see the totality of the irony? In the media literacy gap in America, the media code is a secret hiding in plain sight. That may be in part because reported news looks so different from news as it is happening. It is also in part because the public is reluctant to admit its attraction to media displays of conflict, disaster, prominence, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity. And demographics play a part, when specific groups with specific interests take exception to how editors democratize the news on any given day (see "What is News?").
Meanwhile, the Tracy Clarks have the tools necessary to complete their tasks, both in the field as they collect information for the story, and at their computers, as they analyze all that information, assimilate it into clear thinking, and then organize it into a story. Tracy uses a media code toolbox similar to the "reaction package," but including other tools essential to his craft.
Throughout the reporter's work with the toolbox, the reader remains his hero. Tracy, doing the work, is constantly aware of the reader looking over his shoulder. The reader has priorities. The first is accuracy. Thus accuracy, though it is an impossible goal, becomes the cardinal rule of journalism. Tracy has made mistakes in his 20-year career, and he remembers them more clearly than all the good stuff he has done, because accuracy is a matter of credibility. His workable goal is to minimize mistakes, of fact, of spelling, of grammar, of punctuation. He hasn't made many. His rule: when in doubt, check it out.
The reader's second priority is complete, objective content. Tracy must provide answers to all the questions the reader may have about the story. When he feels the story is finished, from both sides, Tracy will actually ask himself: "Will the reader have any questions about this story that I have left unanswered?" If Tracy's answer to that question is, "No," then the story is finished. If the answer is, "Yes," Tracy has some more work to do. Remember the guess-what scenario; Tracy will keep answering until you have no more questions about the story.
In many stories, all the questions can't be answered, because Tracy can't get them. Reporters must attribute all information to authorities or sources; the reader should never be under the impression that the information is coming from the reporter, unless it is a first-hand account such as a reporter covering a baseball game (and even then, only the players and managers can answer some questions). Routinely, authorities can't provide answers, usually concerning the fifth W: Why? Why did the Air France plane crash? When those answers are known, Tracy will write a new story.
When he feels that he has all the answers, Tracy will have a few pages of notes or tapes, if it is a simple story, or many pages, with other documents, if it is a big, complex story, that he must organize into files before he even thinks of writing the story. Imagine the files compiled by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post in their series of stories about Watergate that resulted in the resignation from office of a sitting United States president. Imagine the files accumulated in answering the Why of 9/11. Throughout, Tracy has relied on the media code to guide his search. Remember, he is your proxy when he asks authorities for the answers he needs to bring you the story.
When Tracy's reporting work is complete – well, let's pause for a clarification. "Reporting" actually means collecting information. When that work is completed, the reporter sits down to write the story. Most of the time, stories are written on deadline. The simplest expression of deadlines is to picture the reporter in Abilene, Texas, a city of about 100,000 population, covering a Friday night football game for The Reporter-News. The paper prints only one edition, and Tracy's deadline is 11:30 p.m. (At large metropolitan newspapers, there will be later deadlines, as many as five or six, depending on the number of editions printed, and before the night is done, depending on when the game ends, Tracy may have written six versions of the story.)
In Abilene, the game ends at 10:15. Tracy leaves the pressbox, sprints down the stadium steps to the locker rooms for some quotes he knows you will want, and by 10:45 is back in the pressbox. He has 45 minutes to finish and file his story. In front of him are pages of notes and scribbled quotes. These he will analyze, assimilate, and organize, and write the story, which typically run 750-1,000 words for a high school football game in Texas.
At no other moment in the process is the media code more essential than in these next 45 minutes. The values and definitions, and other codes, de-mystify his task, no matter if the story is a football game, a Senate debate, or a hotel fire. He scans the information, looking for news. What is news? It's in the code: anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. He finds four bites of information that satisfy the definition. In the trade, these are called "features." A feature is the news; it is what the story is about. The rest of the information is details, and details explain features.
Next, Tracy determines: what kind of story is it? He makes the determination using the 5 W's and the 12 event values, scoring each in the story on their individual strength scale of 1-10. (Next time you read a football game story, score it yourself for the presence of the 12 values. Hint: proximity will score high if your team wins, and low if it loses.) As soon as this step is finished, Tracy can start, in his head, working on the lede. At this moment, with 35 minutes left, Tracy is furiously multi-tasking. He is working on the lede, he is grouping together features with the details that explain them, he is editing details, and he is starting to arrange the features and details into logical order.
The lede, a spelling of "lead" unique to journalism, is the first paragraph of the story, one clear and hopefully provocative sentence that tells the reader what the story is about. It is Tracy's "Guess what!" line. Editing details is a process of choosing the details that must be in the story (to answer all the reader's questions) and which details can be left out. Logical order is arranging the features and details in logical order of importance, from most important – the lede – to auxiliary details in the last paragraphs that may not even make it into the paper. Who tells Tracy, there in the pressbox, working at 110 miles per hour, what logical order is? You do.
This design of lede, edited details and logical order, is the famous inverted pyramid. Unlike the values and definitions, the pyramid did not originate with the public, but it exists today because the public approved it. The media actually created the inverted pyramid and introduced it into the media code at the time of the Civil War, 1861-65. Reporters had available a new technology, the telegraph, to send their stories back to their newspapers from the battlefields. Instead of days or weeks in the pouches of couriers, stories could be telegraphed to appear in newspapers overnight. This new speed was one of the four true revolutions in media history.
But there was a catch. Civil War correspondents wrote their stories in the only composition style they knew: the ages-old narrative, story-telling style typified today by novels, TV dramas, and movies. This design presented information in chronological order, and included many details for interest. The story developed slowly, to create drama, and the climax was at the end. Readers of the day had no cause to object to these 2,000-3,000-word stories.
The problem was access. In the 19th century, operating a mobile telegraph in wartime presented considerable logistics problems. Reporters found themselves lining up to use the same machine. Sending a narrative-style story required considerable time, and the line of reporters waiting their turn outside grew combative. Before long, the military officer in charge of the telegraph was agreeing to limit time on the machine and kicking the reporter out. "But," cried The New York Times, "I'm not even halfway through! I haven't told them who won yet!" Out he went, anyway, and in came the next reporter.
Under the circumstances, the reporters learned very quickly to flip their stories over – thus, the inverted pyramid – put the climax first, edit details to save transmission time, and send the story in logical order, so that nothing in the story after the officer cut it off was more important than any information that came before. In 1865, the Civil War ended, and reporters had no more need for the inverted pyramid. But it survived, and survives today, for one reason only: the reader liked it. It made the reader an editor. He could still read the whole, now condensed, story. But, in time, the reader learned that he or she didn't have to read the entire story to get the news. He could read five paragraphs, or seven, know he had the story's most important facts, and go to the next story. This is the way millions of Americans read the newspaper every morning.
When Tracy finishes his story at 11:29.50, and sends it, the story will pass under two and perhaps three sets of eyes before it is set into the page: the sports editor (or assistant editor working nights) and copy editors. These worthies edit the story with you-know-who in mind (when I edit, I actually imagine myself at home, reading the story in the newspaper). Copy editors, by the way, write the story's headline. Reporters DO NOT write headlines.
I need to acknowledge that what you have just read is an account of the media code's role in classic journalism since the mid-nineteenth century. More than 140 years later, the media code remains the heart of journalism. Journalism's body, however has changed radically. Television news has required reporters to condense stories to fit an average broadcast delivery speed of 140 words per minute, at a price of loss of story content and depth. Starting in the 1970s, television's evening news programs, both national and local, essentially killed the circulation, and eventually the existence of, evening newspapers. Business aspects, particularly corporate ownership, have exerted dangerous cost-cutting and political pressure on objective news operations. Internet news and information operations, with 24/7 deadlines, ridiculously low overhead, and a revolutionary business model, prompt media analysts to portray traditional news organizations – newspapers, certainly, but also television news – as dinosaurs lumbering toward the final abyss.
The traditional organizations are scrambling and struggling to adapt the Internet model, and those struggles are outside the scope of this Media Literacy series, except when journalism's 21st-century body seeks to reject the heart. Many online versions of newspapers and several all-online operations such as The Huffington Post, invite – nay, encourage – the participation of what they call "citizen journalists." Unless these participants are at lease as conversant as Tracy Clark in the media code, then they are not "citizen journalists" at all, but what I call "macramé journalists," or, worse, paperazzi.
June 06, 2009
Evidence for hope from a plunging airliner
Whenever an airliner goes down, this time Air France 447, I feel compelled to tell again my experience in an airliner that was about to crash, partly in tribute to those lost, and partly as a kind of balm offered to those who grieve the lost.
My experience began early on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 28, 1958, when two chartered DC-3 airliners took off from the Abilene, Texas, airport, carrying the Abilene High football team to a playoff game in El Paso, 444 miles to the west. I was 15 years old, a sophomore, on the second DC-3, last seat on the right.
I loved airplanes, and this was my first flight on a big airplane. The DC-3, an historic airplane, was propeller-powered, two engines, capacity 27. I loved to go out to the airport to watch them land and take off. Blue flame shot from the exhausts when the pilot cranked the engines and they caught. I paid attention to every detail of boarding, preparation, taxi and takeoff.
About an hour into the flight, I knew we were approaching Big Spring, 100 miles west of Abilene. I got up from my seat and asked the two guys on the other side of the aisle – one of them was Graham Holland, a big tackle – if I could look out their window at Webb Air Force Base, which I knew was below. I was standing, looking out the window, when, with no sense of time passing, or of anything happening, I found myself spread-eagled on the ceiling of the airplane. My arms and legs were glued flat to the ceiling, and I could not move them. My eyes were frozen open; I could not close them.
Directly below me was the window, and below the window was the ground: brown, West Texas rangeland. The land was rising toward me, quickly, accelerating, and I could not look away. I could not move. In the next instant, with no sense of time passing, or anything having happened, I found myself on the floor of the airplane. On top of me was Graham Holland, and assorted items from trays and overhead bins, including a weird piece of equipment that, loving airplanes, I recognized.
It was a long, square stick, maybe four feet long, red and white with gradation marks painted in black. It was the stick that, at the airport, they lowered into the wing tanks to measure fuel amounts. I thought: this stick belongs on the outside of the airplane. If it's on the outside, that must mean that I am on the outside, which means I must be dead.
But I wasn't. After several silent seconds, we started picking ourselves up. It was very quiet on the DC-3. We realized we were still flying. We found our seats and very soon, on the intercom, came the voice of the pilot, Charles L. Kageler. He told us we had been in a near-collision with another plane, which he believed was a military jet from Webb AFB. He said he had had to drop his airplane suddenly, that we had fallen about a thousand feet, but that we were okay, flying straight and level and climbing back up to altitude.
Also aboard the plane was Abilene Reporter-News sports writer Fred Sanner. His story about the near-miss led the front page in Saturday morning's Reporter-News. Details: Kageler saw the jet (I was looking out the same side of our plane, but didn't see the other plane), cut power to both engines and rolled the 25,000-pound DC-3 hard left, essentially standing the airplane on its left wingtip. We dropped straight down, which was what glued me to the ceiling. He said the other airplane missed us by about 25 feet. I had a huge bump on my head, and my name was in the story. The only other injury was a sprained ankle. The headline: "Tragedy Brushes Close to Eagle Plane."
We flew on to El Paso, played Ysleta High School the next day, beat them, 40-6, and flew back to Abilene without incident. But everyone on board that DC-3 on that Friday had become members of a club. As a member, I knew three things about being on board a plane that is about to crash. One, the ground really does come up to get you. Two, your life does pass before your eyes. I was only 15, so there wasn't much on the reel, but I saw it all. Three, there was no panic, no terror, on the airplane. No one made a sound, during or after the event.
I am glad to know that, when I read about flights like Air France 447. I have evidence from a plunging airliner to suggest that the brain is a logical instrument and wants to put patterns on all the data it receives. But on the DC-3, data was coming too fast, and didn't make any sense when compared to all known data. There literally was not time to understand, to be afraid, or to experience terror. I wonder also if the brain doesn't have emergency circuits to protect itself, and its host, from panic, or terror, by triggering distractions like your life passing before your eyes. In those seconds, you either get out of it, or you don't. I got out of it. Another few seconds, we would have hit. Either way, I am spared the indignity of terror.
In January, when US Air Capt. Chesley Sullenberger landed his airliner in the Hudson River, passengers reported a quiet calm all the way down. I would attribute that to brains searching for a pattern. How much time elapsed between the beginning and the end of the event on Flight 447? Impossible to say, but possible to believe, believe me, that it was over before anybody knew.
My experience began early on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 28, 1958, when two chartered DC-3 airliners took off from the Abilene, Texas, airport, carrying the Abilene High football team to a playoff game in El Paso, 444 miles to the west. I was 15 years old, a sophomore, on the second DC-3, last seat on the right.
I loved airplanes, and this was my first flight on a big airplane. The DC-3, an historic airplane, was propeller-powered, two engines, capacity 27. I loved to go out to the airport to watch them land and take off. Blue flame shot from the exhausts when the pilot cranked the engines and they caught. I paid attention to every detail of boarding, preparation, taxi and takeoff.
About an hour into the flight, I knew we were approaching Big Spring, 100 miles west of Abilene. I got up from my seat and asked the two guys on the other side of the aisle – one of them was Graham Holland, a big tackle – if I could look out their window at Webb Air Force Base, which I knew was below. I was standing, looking out the window, when, with no sense of time passing, or of anything happening, I found myself spread-eagled on the ceiling of the airplane. My arms and legs were glued flat to the ceiling, and I could not move them. My eyes were frozen open; I could not close them.
Directly below me was the window, and below the window was the ground: brown, West Texas rangeland. The land was rising toward me, quickly, accelerating, and I could not look away. I could not move. In the next instant, with no sense of time passing, or anything having happened, I found myself on the floor of the airplane. On top of me was Graham Holland, and assorted items from trays and overhead bins, including a weird piece of equipment that, loving airplanes, I recognized.
It was a long, square stick, maybe four feet long, red and white with gradation marks painted in black. It was the stick that, at the airport, they lowered into the wing tanks to measure fuel amounts. I thought: this stick belongs on the outside of the airplane. If it's on the outside, that must mean that I am on the outside, which means I must be dead.
But I wasn't. After several silent seconds, we started picking ourselves up. It was very quiet on the DC-3. We realized we were still flying. We found our seats and very soon, on the intercom, came the voice of the pilot, Charles L. Kageler. He told us we had been in a near-collision with another plane, which he believed was a military jet from Webb AFB. He said he had had to drop his airplane suddenly, that we had fallen about a thousand feet, but that we were okay, flying straight and level and climbing back up to altitude.
Also aboard the plane was Abilene Reporter-News sports writer Fred Sanner. His story about the near-miss led the front page in Saturday morning's Reporter-News. Details: Kageler saw the jet (I was looking out the same side of our plane, but didn't see the other plane), cut power to both engines and rolled the 25,000-pound DC-3 hard left, essentially standing the airplane on its left wingtip. We dropped straight down, which was what glued me to the ceiling. He said the other airplane missed us by about 25 feet. I had a huge bump on my head, and my name was in the story. The only other injury was a sprained ankle. The headline: "Tragedy Brushes Close to Eagle Plane."
We flew on to El Paso, played Ysleta High School the next day, beat them, 40-6, and flew back to Abilene without incident. But everyone on board that DC-3 on that Friday had become members of a club. As a member, I knew three things about being on board a plane that is about to crash. One, the ground really does come up to get you. Two, your life does pass before your eyes. I was only 15, so there wasn't much on the reel, but I saw it all. Three, there was no panic, no terror, on the airplane. No one made a sound, during or after the event.
I am glad to know that, when I read about flights like Air France 447. I have evidence from a plunging airliner to suggest that the brain is a logical instrument and wants to put patterns on all the data it receives. But on the DC-3, data was coming too fast, and didn't make any sense when compared to all known data. There literally was not time to understand, to be afraid, or to experience terror. I wonder also if the brain doesn't have emergency circuits to protect itself, and its host, from panic, or terror, by triggering distractions like your life passing before your eyes. In those seconds, you either get out of it, or you don't. I got out of it. Another few seconds, we would have hit. Either way, I am spared the indignity of terror.
In January, when US Air Capt. Chesley Sullenberger landed his airliner in the Hudson River, passengers reported a quiet calm all the way down. I would attribute that to brains searching for a pattern. How much time elapsed between the beginning and the end of the event on Flight 447? Impossible to say, but possible to believe, believe me, that it was over before anybody knew.
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