Journalism Archives

February 13, 2015

Ouch, That Hurts

I’ve been putting off organizing the mountain of receipts I accumulated from all my road trips this year. I was less afraid of the IRS deadline than Wife Lila who had been “encouraging” me to get with it for weeks.

After spending two days adding up negative numbers, I don’t have much energy to post tonight.

Thanks to you who pushed the Big Red Button to place your Amazon orders. That brought in $1,646.98 in 2014. Thanks, too, to the Athens County Historical Society and Museum and the Ohio Humanities Council for a grant. The Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum and Annie Laurie’s Antique Shop have been great about selling books and prints.

Redder than that button

The bottom line is that I’m operating deep in the red. The only solace I can take is that my shortfall is probably less than I would be in the hole if I was a golfer, owned a boat or took a family of four to Disney World.

I’m starting to work on a souvenir memory book for sale at this year’s ’60s’ decade reunion that I’m hoping will generate some income, and I have some other things up my sleeve to keep me afloat.

In the meantime, keep pressing the Big Red Button when you shop at Amazon. I get a small percentage of your purchase, and it doesn’t add anything to your bill.

I’m not griping about taxes

I’m not complaining about PAYING taxes, mind you. Nothing would make me prouder than moving into a higher tax bracket.

January 29, 2015November 22, 2020

Nellie Vess Revisited

Back in 2012, I did a piece titled Turtles, Frogs, Dogs and Desperation where I explained how I come up with story ideas. (The key word was “desperation.) It’s worth a visit, even if I say so myself.

In it, I introduced Mrs. Nellie Vess, one of my favorite subjects. You can click on the photos to make them larger.

Rhonda and Patty Sue

It told the story of how an elderly woman found that puppy Patty Sue attracted the neighborhood kids like Rhonda Kay Judson, 5. The headline of my 1968 Athens Messenger Picture Page was Lonely No More.

‘Now I have lots of company,” Mrs. Vess told me.

Fast-forward to 2015

I love getting comments, but today’s mail brought one from Sheila Knott that was super-special:

“This is my sister and our neighbor years ago!!! It was such a joy to see this. I knew Mrs Vess very well and she was a wonderful woman. I was born a year and 5 days after these pics were takin! Thank you so much for sharing and I’ll have to show my sister (Rhonda) the second one, I don’t believe she has ever seen it!”

Speaking of desperation

I mentioned over the holidays that I had some stuff that I needed to get done and that I might slack off for a week. As it turned out, I produced rerun pages during that period that took almost as much time as if I had come up with fresh content.

My van buying / selling experience put me even further behind.

On top of that, I may have a chance to pick up some freelance work that may actually mean that Wife Lila and I won’t have to fight Bleeping Cat for dinner. (We haven’t bothered to name most of our feline parade over the years. Oh, yes, there is an official name on file with the vet, but we usually just call them “Brown Cat, Big Cat, Little Cat, Orange Cat or, in the case of the current resident, “Bleeping Cat.”)

So, don’t be surprised if I come up missing from time to time or all that gets posted is a photo gallery of what I happen to be editing at the time.

Of course, while I’m gone, don’t forget to click on the tiny yellow DONATE button at the top of the page to keep Phoebe the Bleeping Cat fed.

December 18, 2014December 19, 2014

Cuban Boatlift Part 1

Road Warriorette Jan and Son Matt nagged at me this morning to dig out some of my Cuban Boatlift photos to go along with the big news that President Obama was going to thaw the Cold War that had been going on since about 1959 or thereabouts.

I protested that I hadn’t even THOUGHT about dipping into my Florida years, but they were persuasive. After about nine boxes, I hit one containing outtakes from the month (minus one day) I spent in Key West watching a flood of people who would change the face of Florida and parts of the United States.

Palm Beach Post May 6

I’ll go into more detail and publish more photos after I’ve had a chance to see what I can find. To be honest, my stomach has been a bit iffy today, and I haven’t felt like spending time in front of the scanner.

We sent a team to Mariel Harbor

We sent photographer George Millener and reporter Edgar Sanchez down to Key West to try to talk their way onto a boat going over to pick up relatives. The word was that it didn’t take long to make the 180-mile round trip. They made a quick call saying they were getting ready to depart and that they’d check in as soon as they got back.

We didn’t hear from that day, nor the next. I was director of photography and was working on a project that was going to take me all over the state, so I decided to use that leeway to check on our team since I needed to go to Key West at some point anyway.

As soon as I hit U.S. 1 south of Miami, I was in a convoy of trailered boats. Every boat that wasn’t on a trailer heading south was parked on the roadside with a For Sale sign on it.

At the Key West city marina, boats were being launched two abreast as quickly as inexperienced mariners could back the trailers up. I saw at least one Cadillac go in up to the windows when the driver backed up too far.

I called the office and said this was a bigger story than the wires were reporting and that I needed a reporter to back me up.

Dick Donovan

They couldn’t have sent a better guy: Dick Donovan was an old-time Chicago cop reporter who had a reputation for getting to the meat of a story. He would stand next to you, then, just before he asked the zinger question that was going to get the subject to react, he’d give you an elbow in the ribs to tell you to get ready.

I’ll go into more detail about the photo at the top left, but I’ll just say that this was the only time I saw Dick with tears in his eyes.

I had to walk away

It didn’t produce as many memorable photos as I would have liked, but it made some memories I’ll never forget.

I was photographing a little boy about the age of Son Matt playing with a little plastic truck just like Matt had at home. Suddenly I realized what a big change was happening in that boy’s life and wondered what the future held for him. I had to walk away for a few minutes.

A little Cuban nun who might have been stacked 4’8″ at best, put her hand on my shoulder and said in broken English, “I’ve been watching you. You don’t just take pictures. You have a big heart.”

That comment meant more to me than any award I ever won.

June 10, 2014

Scrawls, Nixon and a Couch

I was rummaging through a box and ran across two cartoons drawn by Scrawls, the Palm Beach Post’s editorial cartoonists in the ’70s.

Sam Rawls is his real name, but we all called him Scrawls. (People who REALLY know him call him Scooter, but I never achieved that level of closeness.)

He left The Post to go to our Big Sister paper in Atlanta, where he stuck around about seven years. I lost track of where he was, and was almost afraid to Google him because I was afraid the trail would lead to an obit.

Fortunately, there’s still some ink left in his pen.

Speaking Southern

Long before Jeff Foxworthy came along with his “You might be a redneck if…” shtick, Post columnist Steve Mitchell wrote a book How to Speak Southern, illustrated by Sam. It was followed by More How to Speak Southern, followed by a combination of the two marketed as The Complete How to Speak Southern. Click on the links to order a copy from Amazon and make both Sam and me a few pennies.

Sam has always cared about the environment. He’s been drawing cartoons to support the Initiative to Protect Jekyll Island. Take a look at some of his artwork skewering developers. I’m sure he is more effective at getting the point across than a whole forest of position papers.

Getting back to the cartoons

When Sam was packing up his office to go to the Big Time, I walked in to seeing him ripping up scads of his old cartoons. “What in the world are you doing?” I cried in a horrified tone.

“They’ve already been published, and I don’t want them floating around where somebody will sell them, so I’m tearing them up.”

I managed to convince him to let me make off with these two Nixons from the Watergate era. One one he wrote a flattering message, “To Ken – The best button-pusher I know;” on the other, a more Scrawlsian “To Ken – if you sell it – make sure you get a good price.”

The story of the couch

Newspapers were a little less politically correct (and a lot more fun) in the old days. They were inhabited by misfits on their way up and on their way down, and characters were the rule instead of the exception.

The photo department had a small room we called the Wire Room. It was used for storage and housed the Associated Press wirephoto transmitter. At one time, before I was hired, it contained an old black couch with an indeterminate covering. It looked like leather, but it was probably some substance not occurring in nature.

Someone told me that a homeless hooker used to walk Dixie Highway in front of the paper, and the photographers, being tenderhearted, offered her the couch as a place to sleep. Management got wind of their largess and said the couch had to go. [Checking the definition of “largess,” I’m not sure that’s exactly the right word: “Something given to someone without expectation of a return,” but, like I said, that all happened before I got to West Palm Beach…]

The couch was exiled to Sam’s office where it was assumed nothing nefarious would ever go on, said my source.

Couch Version II

When I finally tracked Sam down this evening (he had been dodging torrential rain in Conyers, Georgia, where he lives), I had to ask him what happened to the couch. I thought I remembered management shipping it to him as a joke when he left.

“That was my couch. I bought it. I’ve never heard the hooker story.”

We were both appalled that someone made up that story to pull my leg. On the other hand, we agreed that it was too good a story to cut out. If I outlive Sam, it’ll go back to being the Hooker Couch.

What is your favorite cartoon?

As soon as I asked what Sam considered his favorite cartoon, I cringed, knowing how I feel when someone asks about my favorite photo. Sam came back with an answer that I’m liable to steal, “I hope it’s the one on my drawing board the day I die.”

Just for the record, I didn’t shoot any of these photos. They came from a box we called “Party Pix,” a collection of staff photos going back to the early or mid-60s. If you doubt my earlier statement about working with characters, you need to take a walk down memory lane with me and that box.