Lake Okeechobee Archives

January 1, 2015January 1, 2015

Resolutions and Sunrises

This illustration I did for The Southeast Missourian in 1966 shows how Wife Lila and I usually welcome in the New Year.

Follow this link to see more photos of Terri and Roy Murdoch, children of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Murdoch, and to read about their dad.

I’m not sure I ever heard Chuck Murdoch called “Charles.” He was just “Chuck,” one of my favorite sports editors. He didn’t take himself or his job too seriously, but he loved covering kid sports and did everything he could to get as many names in the paper as he could.

When did you quit smoking?

I recall the year that Dad quit smoking cold turkey on New Year’s Eve. We all noticed that he had gotten crankier than usual, but he didn’t tell us for a couple of weeks that he had tossed all his cigarettes in the fireplace at the stroke of midnight. He didn’t want to say anything until he was sure he could do it.

I’ve been binge-watching the TV series Mad Men, which is about an advertising agency in New York in the 1960s. I thought I was going to choke to death during the first few episodes because there wasn’t a scene that didn’t have people filling the air with smoke. When I thought back on it, that’s just the way it was in those days, particularly in the newsroom.

(The photo department became non-smoking as soon as I became director of photography. I claimed it was for technical and safety reasons, but the truth was that I hated smelling the smoke.)

Plenty of readers shared their smoking experiences.

Sunrise on the beach

In a moment of insanity on the first day of 2011, I consented to go to the Lake Worth beach to watch the sun come up. Now, don’t get me wrong. I HAVE seen the sun come up before, but it’s almost always been because I stayed up all night the night before.

Anyway, it was a beautiful dawn and I don’t regret going.

Once.

Click on the link so you can see how nice it was (and keep from having to go yourself).

Start the year off right

While you are making your New Year’s resolutions, make a note that you will click on the big red Click Here button at the top of the page (or right here) whenever you order something from Amazon.

I get a tiny percentage of the price, and it doesn’t cost you a penny.

How about that? Here’s a resolution that doesn’t cause you to sweat, doesn’t cost you any money and doesn’t change your eating or drinking habits. You can’t beat that with a stick.

May 23, 2014

Palate Cleanser Photos

I shoot a lot of random stuff that isn’t quite enough for a whole story. When I was working at The Athens Messenger, we’d post pictures like that on The Wall of Desperation, to bail us out when the well was dry and the monster in the pressroom still needed feeding.

I haven’t reached that point yet, since I still have some fresh Cape stories in the bag, but I thought I’d run these random scenics as a palate cleanser.

Random photo gallery

Click on a photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to look at a sunset over Lake Okeechobee; a falling-down building in Capps, Florida; cattle grazing in Cape County, ducks at Capaha Park and springtime in North County Park.

May 17, 2014

Contrail Brings Challenger Chills

The Road Warriorettes and I had a great day touring Florida. I’ll be sharing some of those stories and some neat things we discovered in Georgia in the future. Getting along toward sunset, I said we should take a look for gators at Nubbins Slough on the northeast corner of Lake Okeechobee.

When we got to the top of the dike, we met a pickup truck parked looking east, but didn’t think anything of it. Curator Jessica got out to shoot the clouds turning orange on the north side of the lake. When I went to swing the van around to get it out of the road, I froze.

Flashback to January 28, 1986

In the rearview mirror, I saw a contrail that brought back that cold morning on January 28, 1986, when I climbed on the roof at The Palm Beach Post to see the corkscrewing smoke left over from the Challenger explosion.

I called Wife Lila in West Palm Beach to ask if she knew if there had been a rocket launch at The Cape. She said one was supposed to have gone off at 8:03, but she didn’t know if it had any problems.

My photo was taken at 8:07, assuming the time programmed into my camera was correct.

It wasn’t until I got home that I read that a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket carrying a $245 million Global Positioning System satellite was launched into space Friday after a 24-hour weather delay.

Shortly after I turned my attention away from the rocket trail, the sky came alive.

Warriorettes are leaving me

Anne Rodgers, Texan, former newspaper colleague and bike riding partner, is moving back home to Texas early in June. Curator Jessica Cyders, from the Athens Historical Society and Museum, will be heading back to Athens, Ohio, next week to her husband and cat. She hopes that neither has starved to death in her absence.

I hope the pictures they shot at Nubbins Slough this afternoon will bring back fond memories of our meandering.

Y0u can click on the photos to make them larger.