The Peter Kihss Award 2012

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 02:56:14 +0000

THE SOCIETY OF THE SILURIANS

EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM AWARDS DINNER

Thursday, May 17, 2012
6 PM
Honoring the year’s outstanding achievements
and presentation of the Peter Kihss Award to:

Robert Lipsyte, journalist and fiction writer

Robert Lipsyte

For his outstanding accomplishments as a journalist and fiction writer
and his generosity as a mentor to younger colleagues.

The Players Club
16 Gramercy Park South
New York City

Tabloid greats wrote about ordinary ‘ruck’ of life

admin — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:17:50 +0000

July 7th, 2011

By Pat Fenton - from the Irish Times Online

Breslin is back at the Daily News and Pete Hamill has a new book out that everybody is talking about, “Tabloid City.” And that’s good news, but sadly, both events also remind me that something important to Irish culture is slipping away from us. The sort of journalism they both perfected as they wrote stories in the Daily News and the New York Post about the city’s Irish working-class neighborhoods is fading away. And so are some of the Irish neighborhoods they wrote about.

The first time I ever read a newspaper column by Pete Hamill I was sitting in Kerrigan’s bar in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn one afternoon, reading the New York Post. It was in the 1960s, and I had just come home from two years in the Army. I was 22.

I didn’t know who Pete Hamill was, but I couldn’t stop reading what he was writing about our neighborhood. He was writing about the factories on 7th Avenue, about the local bars like Farrell’s on 16th Street and 9th Avenue, and how his father from Belfast, Ireland, drank there. My father from Galway, Ireland, drank there too.

I remember holding up the Post, a liberal newspaper at that time and hated in our conservative neighborhood, and asking the bartender if he knew who this guy Pete Hamill was. And I remember what he said to me. ”He’s that effing Communist from down on 7th Avenue. And he went to Holy Name School, too,” he said, shaking his head, as he mentioned the parochial school we all went to. He said more, but I don’t remember it.

All that stuck in my mind was that he was writing about us. Our world. And I knew then for the first time that I wanted to be a writer.

The sort of writing he was doing, picking up on Irish-American working-class stories in his journalism where James T. Farrell left off in his fiction with his Studs Lonigan trilogy is disappearing.

His Studs Lonigan could have been a local legend in Windsor Terrace that he wrote about in his columns, a dock worker named Noonan Taylor, who some said was the toughest man in Brooklyn. He wrote about bar fights, and drinking your fill of whiskey and beer on the weekends after a week of back breaking, labor in the factories of the neighborhood, and slow dancing with the neighborhood girls on Saturday nights down in places like the Caton Inn on Coney Island Avenue as the song “Dream,” by Jo Stafford, played over and over again on the juke box.

The late Jimmy Cannon was probably one of the first Irish-American journalists to cross the vague line that bordered fiction and factual writing in newspapers, and doing it before anyone ever heard the term “New Journalism.”

After Cannon came a long list of other Irish-American journalists like: Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Joe Flaherty, Dennis Duggan, Jack Deacy, Jim Dwyer, Dan Barry and T. J. English, all of them with their own story to tell about New York’s Irish working-class.

Before Joe Flaherty got his first by-line, he worked as a longshoreman on the docks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, unloading grain bags as a member of the union his late father was the president of, Local 1266 of the Grain Handlers.

Flaherty, who wrote for the Village Voice, and sadly died too young, was no doubt one of the best of them. He once told me that “if you really want to find out about this city go out and talk to a guy who cuts meat for a living. Talk to a guy who makes a living behind the stick of a bar. They’ll tell you what’s really wrong with it. They know more about it than any politician.”

Their beat was up in the bars of Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, it was Beach 116th Street in Rockaway, and places like 9th Avenue down in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, that once had Irish saloons on both corners of 17th Street, Kerrigan’s and McNulty’s, it was T.J. English’s Hell’s Kitchen, and Breslin’s Queens Boulevard, lined with bars and cocktail lounges all the way down to the entrance of the 59th Street Bridge — bars where stories of the city were told again and again over whiskey and beer on Saturday nights.

They were all writing about the ordinary ruck of life that existed in these places. The Daily News, where Breslin worked for more than a decade, probably has two of the last of that genre of writers left, Denis Hamill and Michael Daly.

I got to know Breslin after I had a story published in New York Magazine in 1973. It was called “Confessions of a Working-Stiff,” about my years of working as a cargo-man out in Kennedy Airport for Seaboard World Airlines.

He was always telling me to write a book. One afternoon when we were drinking in a rough, cargo man’s bar called the Owl, near Kennedy Airport, I told him that I had gone to the library and took out a book on how to write a novel.

I had been working with him on an idea he had about turning the world of cargo men at Kennedy Airport into a pilot for a television series.

I remember him uttering a string of curses under his breath and then barking at me in that gravelly Breslin voice that turned every head in the bar, “Jesus, you don’t read a book on writing a book; you just write it.”

I tried to spit out that I just wanted to get an idea of how many chapters a novel should be, how long it should be, but he would have none of it as he shook his head in annoyance. “Don’t worry. You’ll know when it’s done.”

After that outburst, I was nearly afraid to ask him my next question. Would he sign a first edition I brought with me of his novel “World Without End, Amen”? He took some time writing in it, so I asked him what he wrote. He just barked, “Never mind. Read it later.” And he slammed it shut.

When I got home, I opened it up and read the words, “May 11, 1978. For Pat Fenton. Who should simply sit down and start writing 2 pages a day for the next year. Sincerely, Jimmy Breslin.”

Some Saturday afternoons I would just walk into the old Daily News building on 42nd Street, and take an elevator up to the floor he was on. This was in the 1970s, before metal scanners. He would be sitting alone in a glass fronted, small office at the end of a long hall. I would watch him struggle with his newspaper column with the pressure of a deadline pushing on him. He would stop every now and then and scream at me, “Answer the phone.”

His coat would be thrown over a chair and his tie would be hanging unmade around his neck, as if he was getting ready for a bar fight rather than the creative act of writing. The sweat would roll down his head in beads and all along his desk, and on the floor there would be piles of crumpled paper with his discarded words. With the intensity of a bullfighter, he would stare at the typewriter that held paper covered with his pen marks.

When he was finished writing, he would sit back in his chair and read his copy to an editor over the phone, and the story would appear in that night’s Bulldog edition of the Sunday Daily News with all the smoothness and spontaneity of a great barroom tale.

Then he would knot up his tie again, walk out of the Daily News building, hail a cab, and wave as he disappeared into the streets of the city.

Today, the sort of Irish working-class journalism that he, Jimmy Cannon, and Pete Hamill came out of is also disappearing, and so is the world that nurtured it. Glasses up to the lot of them.

No One Died in the Press Box

admin — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:39:54 +0000

By Arlene Schulman from her blog ArlenesScratchPaper.blogspot.com

Once in a while when the subject comes up, I inform the inquisitive that the most formative period in my life so far was my twenties and thirties,when I was raised by itinerant prizefighters, baseball players and the sportswriters who covered them: those who did well and neer-do-wells, trainers of champions and their opponents, and ball players who sometimes made foolish errors on and off the field. Like a sticky-fingered thief, I slipped into rooms of their souls to steal their stories and repurpose them into my own.

Willie Randolph

Ray Arcel

From Willie Randolph of the New York Yankees, I learned about the helplessness of fumbling baseballs, game after game in front of millions, so that a wrongly colored tablecloth at a dinner for thirty seemed so less important. Hank Steinbrenner, younger and slimmer (and so was I) spoke of the expectations of his father and I looked at the expectations of my own. Boxing trainer Ray Arcel and his quiet dignity, humanity and humility taught me that the bum in the ring is still a man with the same dignity, no matter what his price tag. From boxing gym owner Artemio Colon, I learned that one doesn’t have to be a world champion to be a success.

Artemio Colon

I didn’t have a head full of statistics or a box of rubber-bandedbaseball cards and failed dreams of playing the outfield. My curiosity, plain and simple, was to understand how people lived, won, lost, loved, persevered, who they were and where they were headed.

Film editor and amateur boxing referee Frank Martinez pushed me out of the editing room, shoved a camera in my hand and ordered me to shoot and to write about people. I haven’t stopped.

Sitting in press boxes, kibitzing in dugouts and locker rooms, and attending sporting events alongside renowned sportswriters like Dave Anderson, Vic Ziegel, Barney Nagler, Mike Katz and Jerry Izenberg. I dismissed contemporary novels as too trivial compared to their writings and the writings of A.J. Liebling, Red Smith, Bill Heinz, Budd Schulberg and Paul Gallico, who captured a colorful sports scene when the world was a much smaller place and people spent more time with each other.

At the non-quite yet half-century mark, I find myself bereft of an acknowledgment to the men and women who have helped shape, inspire, propel, encourage and even discourage me, and who are no longer with us. (The living are another story.) But at least half a dozen times a year, someone’s obituary appears and this part of my life reappears once again, only to disappear at the turn of a page or the click of a link on a website.

Leon Spinks

Eddie Futch and Michael Spinks

Many of the men would sit at the bar and regale each other with stories or eat dinner together. I remember dining with the boxing trainer Eddie Futch and his fighters more than once: they drank water, ate steak, and went to bed before 10 pm. So did I. Or I stayed in my hotel room and watched television or telephoned my latest boyfriend or friends to complain that the wallpaper didn’t match the bedspread and that I couldn’t wait to be home.

A woman was a novelty and sometimes I was mistaken for a sportswriter’s girlfriend or daughter or the press assistant. Never the round card girl, though. At press conferences, I was one of the fellas, mixed in with a sea of tweed jackets and plaid shirts, a distinctive fashion style I have always avoided. I must confess, though, like The Odd Couples’ Oscar Madison, I have dried my hands on kitchen curtains.

Since I did not write for one particular newspaper, I missed out on the nurturing of an editor and newsroom colleagues and adapting to one newspaper style with its tics and temperaments. Instead, I led more of a latchkey type of existence, adapting styles and becoming resourceful in finding and shaping stories for different outlets, by working the beat on the street much like a cop would. I’d pick up news and information and call editors to pitch stories and when one door closed, I rang other doorbells.

Jose Torres

Irving Rudd

Along the way, the men and women I met lived through times we will never see again. They were trailblazers and groundbreakers, some working for newspapers no longer in existence or carving out careers during the early days of television. I owe them my education, from the clever and witty press agent Irving Rudd, a Damon Runyon character who wore a 1955 Dodgers World Series ring and handled publicity for the Dodgers before they left Brooklyn, and then moved over to boxing; New York Post sportswriter Leonard Lewin who sat next to me ringside and who had more years of experience thanI was old; the writer Marshall Frady whose crisp, elegant writing I only came to appreciate long after we both worked for the ABC News documentary unit; sports producerAmy Sacks and Eleanor Sanger, the first female network sports producer, whose creativity as producers at ABC Sports were limitless; the quiet, courtly and reflective boxing trainer, Eddie Futch; Daily News sports columnist Vic Ziegel; former prizefighters Danny Kapilow and Tino Raino of Ring 8; the humorous and sly boxing trainer Jimmy O’Pharrow from Starrett City, Brooklyn; Minnesota Twins baseball player Kirby Puckett, whose eyes shone with enthusiasm before he self-destructed; former White House press secretary and ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger, who left me reeling from his cigar smoke; the uncontainable and seemingly invincible boxing champion and writer Jose Torres; the fiery Jack Newfield; writer Barney Nagler, who first refused me admission to the Boxing Writers Association and then, later, called me fearless; quiet boxing champion Floyd Patterson; cartoonist Bill Gallo, who offered, and gave me, me his unconditional support; Madison Square Garden boxing president John Condon, who gave me the opportunity to photograph at the Garden; writer Bill Heinz, who shared writing tips with me pounded out on an old manual typewriter; sportscaster Don Dunphy; writer Budd Schulberg; the classy Joan O’Sullivan and the feisty New York Times reporter Edith Evans Asbury, both of whom I met at the Newswomen’s Club; Carl Nesfield, managing editor of the black weekly newspaper, Big Red, who knew what it was like to be an outsider; Manuel de Dios Unanue, who offered me my first steady gig when he was the editor-in-chief of El Diario-La Prensa, even though I didn’t speak much Spanish; sportswriter Victor Calderone, who recommended me to Manuel; and Mickey Mantle, who conducted the interview with a drink in his hand and hoped that I would “do good in radio.”

Victor Calderon and Rene Cubas

Bobby Murcer

Ira Becker, the owner of Gleason’s Gym on 30^th Street, forced me to pay admission a couple of times before I was accepted; Yankees shortstop and broadcaster Phil Rizzuto was quite a character while outfielder turned sportscaster Bobby Murcer sent me to an art gallery; Dick Sandler, the sports editor of Newsday, gave me a chance to write for his paper while irrepressible Will Lieberson, who gave early roles to Dustin Hoffman and Jane Curtin,directed Broadway and off-Broadway shows and reported for the Armed Forces, regaled me with stories about the theater. From ABC News, the producer Steve Fleischman, who was married to film editor Dede Allen, spoke about the business of television; Emmy award winning producer and director Tom Priestley; Judy Crichton, whose legacy in television can never be matched, introduced me to her husband, novelist Robert Crichton, my first meeting with a real author; film editor Nils Rasmussen, who introduced me to the work of his late wife, Life magazine photographer Lisa Larsen, who photographed fashion, Khrushchev and documented refugees, among other subjects; videotape editor Walter Essenfeld who treated production assistants with the same respect as veteran news correspondents; ABC News correspondent Jules Bergman, who recommended books about science; Kitty Lynch of the ABC News Library, who stretched in the ladies room every day at three p.m. wearing a little black dress and perfectly coiffed hair and reading glasses.

I remember riding to Atlantic City with New York Times sportswriter Phil Berger as he sang Frank Sinatra songs. He died much too soon at 58 and treated me like an old Army buddy. He had a work ethic learned in the Army that I still admire: at the keyboard at nine a.m. sharp with an hour for lunch, and then writing until five p.m. I tried, but there were too many distractions.

Pete Sheehy

Pete Sheehy, the Yankees clubhouse man who dated back to the days of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, would bring me popsicles and stored my camera equipment in his locker, possibly making me the only woman to have a locker (of sorts) with the New York Yankees. He died on my birthday in 1985.

Most of the men I met who treated me like a comrade were old enough to be my father or grandfather. These weren’t relationships of shared intimacies and confidences but more like a young soldier in the trenches. We were too far apart in age and temperament and respect for anything but that.

“Hey, kid,” was a common greeting by p.r. men Irving Rudd and Murray Goodman.

Thankfully, I didn’t pick up the vices of some of the writers or what they might explain as indulgences, which included drinking, chain-smoking, chasing women, and in one case snorting cocaine. Every so often a fist fight or feud, or a skirmish or scuffle would erupt. No one died in the press box. One, Manuel de Dios Unanue, was murdered after exposing Columbian drug traffickers.

The men all had stories, particularly the ones who covered the sixties. I wished I had been old enough to live through it, to witness and write about the turbulent times of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Muhammad Ali. While theirs are collections of stories and relationships, mine is one of small moments and incidents. I remember a Yankees relief pitcher named Tim Stoddard who commanded the space by his locker; at six feet eight inches tall, there was no quarrel from me. Whenever a herd of sportswriters moved towards him, he would inform them in no uncertain terms where to go. He sat in his locker reading a book on the day I decided to approach him.

Tim Stoddard

“Don’t you know I don’t speak to the press?” he growled without looking up.

“I had heard that,” I replied cheerfully, “but I didn’t think that included me. I’d like to ask you about your mother for a Mother’s Day story.”

Tim put his book down and answered every question, paying an emotional and tearful tribute to his mother who had died the year before.

Another, the volatile George Bell of the Toronto Blue Jays, cursed at reporters and women sportswriters in general. People knew to stay away. Only one person didn’t know any better. When he launched into a tirade in Spanish, I answered back with a curse word in Spanish. He approached me a few minutes later.

“What do you want to talk to me about?” he asked. “Do you know what you said to me in Spanish?”

“I most certainly did,” I replied haughtily. “But I don’t expect to be treated the way you spoke to me. I’ll be in the Dominican Republic on assignment and would like to arrange for an interview.”

He gave me his telephone number and I did interview him and others. When one of my contact lenses ripped leaving me unable to see, he drove me to his eye doctor for a replacement.

My colleagues once reminded each other, the day before a fight, that Roberto Duran would not grant interviews. I pretended I hadn’t heard and with nothing else to do, I tracked Roberto down in his room and knocked on the door. He was playing dominoes with friends.

Roberto Duran

I introduced myself and said that I was there to ask a few questions and to take a few photographs.

“Oh, come on in,” someone said. “He speaks English but he doesn’t feel comfortable with the language.”

“Oh, good,” I said, easing myself into a chair at the table, “because I speak Spanish and I don’t feel comfortable speaking it so we’re even.”

Marvin Kohn

While the men spoke about champions and contenders, Jack Dempsey’s fourth, last and most loyal wife, Deanna, was lending me a sparkly gold sweater for a Boxing Writers dinner. A female publicist wanted to pluck my unruly blond eyebrows and I allowed it (I still feel the pain). Marvin Kohn, who handed the press for the New York State Athletic Commission and was once Dorothy Dandridge’s p.r. guy, telephoned me one day to tell me that he had consulted with Barney Nagler: “We think you should dress better.” They were right. I shopped for better dresses for boxing dinners and squeezed my feet into painful heels. Barney and Marvin were from a different time and place, when men wore suits and hats and women wore gowns to the boxing matches, and when press credentials stated that no women were allowed in the press box.

The best advice I never took from them: “Marry the poor bastard.”

The old adage “If I knew now what I knew then” doesn’t always hold true. You have to go through most experiences first to be able to appreciate them later. Sometimes it’s best not to know, but to look back with relish.

So when the dust settles on another year lived and when I finally hit that half-century mark, I’ll raise a glass with overdue gratitude for everyone getting me through the first fifty years. I shared a birthday, August 13, with Marvin Kohn and for a few years’ running we would share a celebratory lunch at Ellen’s Cafe down near City Hall.

“Another year has passed,” he would remark.

Yes, Marvin, another year.

But this year and long overdue, I’ll look up and tell Irving and Marvin and Barney and Bill and Pete and Amy and Judy, Walter and the rest: “The kid owes you all a thousand thanks.”

YOUR MONEY? DON’T BANK ON IT!

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:33:27 +0000

by Robert Metz

If Patco is the wave of the future, we’ll all go broke. For two years now, Patco, a family owned construction business, has been trying to get Ocean Bank to make good on illegal withdrawals from Patco’s company account. No doubt about it, the customer and the bank were remiss when hackers put a “trojan horse” in the company’s on line bank account. This led to $100,000 withdrawals on a daily basis until nearly a million dollars had been zonked by the bad guys. A Federal magistrate said the clueless bank’s rudimentary two factor security system was good enough. Patco was clueless too until it noticed — belatedly — that money was flowing out of its account like radiated water out of one of those ruptured nuclear reactors after the Tsunami hit Japan on March 11.

Everything considered I’d as soon swim in the radioactive surf off Fukushima as put my money in the Ocean Bank, a unit of New England’s People’s Bank, a giant with 300 branches and hundreds of thousands of small fry clients. Wait! If Ocean refuses to make good to a medium-sized company which the politicians swear is a bellwether of the nation, what chance would I a mere mortal have were some hacker to tap my stash?

I grew up with the notion that were some creep to find his (or her, let’s be gender neutral here) way into my boodle I’d be made whole, so long as I let the bank or credit card company know there were strange withdrawals for, say, a barrel of Jack Daniels whiskey or a Vera Wang wedding dress within a reasonable period of the dip shift.

What worries me the most is the fact that identify theft has grown faster than a fat lip after a botox injection. Business research firm, Aberdeen Group, has estimated that over $220 billion a year is lost by businesses worldwide via identity theft.

Now you can see that Ocean Bank is being no more than prudent when it tries to shift the loss of a thousand kilobucks to its client rather than take the hit itself. That’s just common sense. Actually, that’s just banking, isn’t it?

There is something to be said for hauling your money out of your not-so-friendly local bank and putting the money under poured concrete. There are advantages to making your money inaccessible. Very few door to door pitchmen arrive with a sledge hammer in their hands. And if you miscalculate and need some spondulicks for the corner deli to soothe the inner man, there may be a former Patco construction worker who’ll lend you a stick of dyn.

To Hewlett Packard With Oceans Of Love And Download Kisses

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:25:44 +0000

by Robert Metz

There is a clash of cultures underway that is costing us jobs and, for those of us who rely on technical assistance, sanity.

Not so long ago, I was a great fan of Hewlett Packard’s product insurance. It was inexpensive relative to Apple’s, and it was effective. Let’s say, you were printing merrily with your HP all-in-one when the dang thing coughed once and died.

If you had my HP warranty – extending as far ahead as four years from my date of purchase – you were going to be all right.

What you did was call HP, speak to a geeky guy or gal in this hemisphere and set up delivery of a refurbished model for the next day. You slid the substitute printer out of the box and slid your ailing machine into the box and shipped it back to HP.

But that was then. These days you need to be a big user to qualify for this service. Answer the questions posed by a virtual voice, inadvertently identify yourself as small fry and you may well be, after a hiatus, matching wits with someone speaking in lilting English. One such called himself, “Ahlicks.” “Spelled A h l i c k s,? ask I? “No, It’s A l e x.” “Sorry about that,” say I.

Having listened to repeated requests that you visit the HP website for a solution to your problem, you have reached the Indian sub continent and could be jawing with some fellow with an HP help manual in his hand and impertinence in his manner.

Forget my “buy America” beef. In fairness, this fellow earns his living solving problems from half a world away. I did mention culture clash, right? In this episode, I told of an issue that had occurred with a superb HP printer I had purchased over four years ago. The printer was out of warranty though it was teamed with an HP laptop that was less than a year old and, thus, still under warranty from the esteemed Palo Alto, CA giant, HP.

I was quickly transferred to “Danny” who spoke in the same delightful lilting accent I have enjoyed on occasions when there were no oceans between me and an Indian-born friend.

Obviously, “Danny” like “Ahlicks” was working under an aka, chosen, I suspect, to bridge our yawning cultural gap.

I was sitting at a desk a dozen miles from my own home trying to help my wife’s niece, a grad student, crank up the HP all-in-one via wi fi bought for the use of this old house printer.

We did the drill, identifying said niece by credit card and said printer by serial number, a model that in a print era past had set me back nearly $400 and which had been bum’s-rushed three times under HP’s fine warranty, I call “break one, get one free.”

Did I sense delight when Danny said he was sorry but HP no longer supports the item in question, an HP 7400 all-in-one?

I squirmed. I twisted for service: “Please sir, I want some more.”

Finally he agreed to provide technical support for $20, HPs standard fee for out-of-warranty HP equipage. Before he began downloading the print “driver” — the software that was to make the antique printer compatible with the state-of-the-art HP laptop — I told him the download was already in. Yet, download he did.

He asked, “Is the download complete?” “Yes” and I started to say, “But that’s not the problem.” He was gone. Our umbilical had been cut due to the snit at the Indian end. Soon wife’s niece was charged for this HP service. I learned this is how HP pays its offshore geeks. And he had our extension. We didn’t have his.

I cold-called HP in India to ask for a credit to the niece’s account. But “Rick” kept saying, “Call me back when you are in front of the printer.” I called from my home, of course, which is twelve miles from the situs of the printer, you will recall.

I asked for Rick’s supervisor and he repeatedly said, as though reading from a cue card, “Call me back when you are in front of the printer.” After a dozen minutes of, as they say in radio land, “dead air” — broken only by my fitful whimpers, “Rick .. Rick … are you there?” — he, too, gave me the click.

I wrote HP CEO Léo Apotheker and eventually got a call from a “Glen” in Palo Alto. Glen spoke California English. He said he’d have the Palo Alto case manager call wife’s niece about a possible refund. Case manager called. Niece was out.

And of course she doesn’t want her money back. What wife’s niece wants is help getting the printer working properly.

She can make this happen on her own, but every time the printer clacks out pages, her laptop is cut off from the internet.

Pal Whitey: My Troubled Friendship With the Legendary Gangster

admin — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:42:17 +0000

By Lewis Grossberger | Grossblogger.com

It was back in the ‘60s that I met Whitey Bulger.

I had traveled to Boston’s colorful old Southie neighborhood to finally see if I could realize my dream: to make it as an Irish minstrel.

At a raffish neighborhood bar one night, after I had sung “Danny Boy” while accompanying myself on the flute–no easy feat, by the way—a tough-looking guy with extremely blond hair came over and introduced himself.

“I’m James Bulger,” he said. “Call me Whitey and I’ll strangle you.”

“How about Bulgy?” I quipped. He struck me over the head with a bottle of beer, opening a gash on my scalp that required fourteen stitches. From then on, we were the best of pals.

“If Whitey don’t kill you, that means he likes you,” a member of his organization, the Winter Hill Gang, explained. “He’s got rage issues.” Read more…….

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:33:35 +0000

Rhyme or Reason:

by Kate Decker

Here are three of a bunch of rhymes from a not yet published book Rhyme or Reason:

You cannot catch the future,
You cannot keep the past.
So hang on to the present,
And try to make it last.
– Kate Delano-Condax (Decker)

Some see life as a race,
With winner and loser
Arranged best to worst;
But life is like dinner:
It isn’t a case
Of finishing first.
– Kate Delano-Condax (Decker)

One principle to live by
Until the day you die:
Never price your principles,
Or somebody might buy.
– Kate Delano-Condax (Decker)

From the member blogs:

The Media Beat:

Crime stories behind the comfort and power
June 2, 2010

TO AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE is one mission of the media, as defined by the now almost forgotten columnist Finley Peter Dunne, celebrated in this column a few months ago. And so is, we are told, telling truth to power.
Some in the media have been rightly exercised by a decision taken this week among the comfortable and powerful. Shareholders of the two companies involved voted overwhelmingly to agree on the infamous coalmining firm Massey Energy being taken over by Alpha Natural Resources for $7.1 billion.
Read more….

From the Member Profiles:

Anita Summers

Ingorance is Not Bliss

A product of London’s East End (where multitudes of Jewish immigrants, fleeing the terror of anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, settled to find safety and freedom), I never succumbed to delusions of grandeur. I had no cause to, as my first glimpse in the mirror unkindly advised me. I was plump, poor, plain, and pimply. No redeeming features and very shy. I only spoke when spoken to, having discovered at an early age that one learns more by listening than by talking.
Read more…

admin — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 02:47:31 +0000

K-K-K-Katie
by Joel Bernstein

She’s gone, given the brush off after five disquieting years in the hot seat of the CBS Evening News. Crowned with great fanfare, accompanied by a retinue, and awarded a yearly salary reported to be $15 million, Katie Couric arrived at CBS with a mandate to put a shine on the stained glass of the fabled Tiffany Network. Or at the very least, move the Evening News out of last place—please!—where it had wretchedly resided for too many grim years. Alas, she failed to accomplish either task and now prepares to gallop off to the far-flung, lesser land of syndication, there to host some kind of talk show.

Call me sentimental but as a former writer and field producer for the Evening News during the proprietorship of Walter Cronkite and then Dan Rather, it saddens me that a once admirable and respected enterprise, one I took great pride in, has become so incredibly besmirched. Not that Katie herself was to blame. It had been muddied before she arrived. She merely piled the mud higher. Recently, Couric put the blame for her show’s persistent cellar-dwelling on weak lead-ins from local affiliates, a pretty lame excuse.

For me though, the real question is not why Katie failed, but what it is that ails the evening news broadcasts, all of them.

In 1987, over 45 million people watched the three evening news shows every day. During the week of April 11, 2011, the number of eyeballs was fewer than 22 million. (NBC 8.7 million; ABC 7.7 million; CBS 5.4 million.) That’s a steep decline. Why do I use the year 1987 as a benchmark? Because that was the first of my two years as CBS bureau chief in Paris, and though I didn’t know it at the time, I was present at the creation of a new paradigm in network news coverage.

A man by the name of Lawrence Tisch had just taken over as CEO of CBS. In 1987, Tisch and his president of news, Howard Stringer, now Sir Howard and head of Sony, made a fact-finding tour of the news division’s European bureaus. (Yes bureaus: there was one in London, Paris, Rome and Bonn.) I had arranged a dinner for them as a way of their meeting the entire Paris Bureau, which at the time consisted of two correspondents, two producers besides myself, a radio reporter, two tape editors, two staff and one almost full-time freelance camera crews, and four office workers. Questions were allowed at that dinner, and although the book hadn’t come out yet, the feeling in the room was perfectly clear: the bureau was from Mars and Tisch and Stringer were from Venus. Venus would prevail. Change was coming, and soon. The staff began complaining about not getting on the air often enough, suggesting that the evening news be expanded, bragging about the esteemed history of the bureau, and Tisch was thinking the hell with history, you guys are being shrunk not expanded, and if you’re not getting on the air often enough, who needs you? Howard was alternately smiling and shaking his head, sadly.

The Tisch visit to Paris, Rome and London led to massive layoffs, to the closing of bureaus, to a reduction in the news budget of about $30 million, and to the thinking that every network news show, like every network entertainment show, had to constitute a “profit center.” News had to make money if it was to survive. Dismantling became the mantra. And the economic squeeze continued through the years at all the networks, but most severely at CBS. Today, there is no bureau in Paris or Rome or Bonn or even Israel. Nearly every CBS News correspondent is based either in New York or Washington or London. Naturally, the quality of the broadcast began to decline, there was a lack of importance, a lack of depth to the stories, and the audience began to shrink.

There was a time when the evening news shows went on the air at seven o’clock, a time when across the country it became routine for people to return from work and watch the network news, a time when not only anchormen but correspondents were household names. At CBS under Cronkite, even viewers who paid scant attention knew Rather at the White House, Mudd on Capitol Hill, Schorr at the agencies, Kalb at State, they knew Eric Sevareid and Charles Kuralt and Morley Safer and Ed Bradley and John Laurence and Bob Simon and Mort Dean. Today, you have to be a news junkie to know the names of correspondents. There is a randomness not a distinctiveness to those who report network news today, and that is true at all three networks.

Recently, I thought cable news was to be the future, that it would offer viewers what magazines offered readers: Fox would be the right-wing equivalent of The Weekly Standard and National Review; MSNBC would be the left-wing equivalent of The Nation and Rolling Stone. I even wrote glowingly about Rachel Maddow at MSNBC, whose values I shared and who I thought was brilliant, incisive and entertaining. It would be Maddow and Bill O’Reilly, I thought, who would command the attention of the TV-news-viewing public. And that would be okay with me.

Well, I’ve changed my mind. I think with the country being so divided politically and culturally, it’s more important than ever that there be national television news broadcasts that are not biased, that do not represent a political point of view, that tell the news straight, with intelligence and insight, and as objectively as possible. PBS could not possibly do the job thoroughly enough because it has no money.

It’s time for the revival of network news, time for the expansion to an hour of network news, possibly the time for a merger or two. You cannot say that no one’s watching—22 million viewers ain’t hay, and that could just be a beginning.

I know it doesn’t rhyme, and Paul Simon please forgive me, but….where have you gone Walter Cronkite? a nation turns its lonely eyes to you… woo woo woo.

Member Profile:

Marlene Sanders

I usually describe myself to my students at NYU as “a formerly famous person.” This also happens to be true. My 15 minutes of fame took place in the 1960s when I was one of only a few women correspondents on the air. Shortly after being hired at ABC News, I fell into an anchor job for a five-minute daily newscast. The evening news, then 15 minutes long and still in black and white, was anchored by Ron Cochran. One day in the fall of 1965, he lost his voice and I was asked to sub. This was big news . . . sort of. It was noted by the New York Times critic Jack Gould that it was the first time a woman had anchored at night. He described me as “a courageous young woman with a no nonsense manner and a Vassar smile.” Not bad for a Middle Western kid who went to Ohio State. Alas, nothing much happened as a result of this ground-breaking experience, but I did go on to a long career in network news, surviving nasty news executives, some dangerous stories and activism in the women’s movement. I had a great time, my family survived it well, and I try to share what I know with, by now, hundreds of students. Looking back, the tough times fade and I remember how lucky I was to have a front row seat for the amazing stories of the tumultuous 60s, 70s and 80s. And I still have that Vassar smile.

_____________________

From the blogs:

“Republican Announces Candidacy But No One Can Remember Which Republican”

By Lewis Grossberger | Grossblogger.com
May. 23 2011 — 10:26 pm

A prominent Republican said today he would seek the party’s nomination for president but reporters who attended the press conference and viewers who watched it on C-SPAN later found they could not remember who it was.

Several reporters said after being questioned by their editors or producers that they were all but certain the contender was a white male in a dark suit who was the former governor of a Midwestern state but beyond that, they were stumped.

Leading pollsters said the newly announced candidate was most likely leading the GOP field at this point or at the very least was in a six-way tie with Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Hermain Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul.

Many Tea Party members, however, said they would find the candidate’s positions too moderate if they knew what those positions were.

2010-2011 Meetings of the Society of the Silurians

admin — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:52:14 +0000

Joseph Berger of the New York Times - Honored – 2011 Peter Kihss Awardee
For Excellence in Journalism

For his outstanding accomplishments as a reporter
and his generosity as a mentor to younger colleagues.

Click on the arrow to hear his talk:

Jules Feiffer – April 21, 2011 Luncheon
Syndicated Cartoonist, Creator of Iconic Comic Strip, ”Feiffer,” Author of 35 Books, Films and Screenplays, Winner of 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in the Village Voice.

Click on the arrow to hear his luncheon talk:

Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky – March 17, 2011 Luncheon
Triple M as she’s known founded Womens Campaign International, providing political training to women worldwide. She’s a former Congresswoman and holder of 5 Emmys for TV reporting. Currently, Professor of Government at Penn and mother-in-law of Chelsea Clinton.

Click on the arrow to hear her luncheon talk.

Charles Osgood – February 17, 2011 Luncheon
Acclaimed for his whimsical poetry on The Osgood File (mornings on the CBS Radio). Anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning (TV) since 1994, and always easy to spot in a crowd by his ever-present bow tie. A member of the Radio Hall of Fame.

Click on the arrow to hear his luncheon talk.

Tom Brokaw - January 20, 2011 Luncheon
Renowned Former Anchor and Managing Editor, NBC Nightly News [1982-2004], Author of the acclaimed ‘The Greatest Generation,’ Former Host of NBC’s Three Major News Broadcasts: NBC Nightly News, The Today Show and Meet the Press.

Click on the arrow to hear his luncheon talk.

Frank Rich Honored – 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awardee
“Powerful Sunday Op-Ed Columnist for the New York Times. Former Chief Theatre Critic”

Click on the arrow to hear his Lifetime Achievement Award dinner talk.