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A baseball first for me: Smoke delay
I have been going to Major a league Baseball games since 1974. And I have never been in a smog or smoke delay.
Till now.
The smoke from the Canadian wildfires caused a nearly 45-minute delay on the afternoon getaway game between the San Diego Padres and the Pittsburgh Pirates at PNC Park in Pittsburgh.
It wasn’t great conditions. I wondered for a time whether it would go on.
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How they’re growing
Nature really is a wonder.
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Breathing easier, and what a wonder that is
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com I spent about an hour working out on a marvelous early summer night — the first night of summer it was — and the latest of a half-dozen outdoor activities of an hour or so the past week.
Between strides, I noticed something was different. I wasn’t wheezing. There was no coughing. My nose wasn’t running. Allergies, which have debilitated me most of my life every spring, had disappeared.
It had been a tough couple of weeks, between the height of pollen season and the Canadian wildfires that drifted smoke in the skies above my head. Add to the fact the fact that I had run out of the allergy medication I use daily in the spring and fall and I had never gotten a refill. For the first week or two after stopping the medication, I wondered about how stupid I was.
And then, the symptoms eased.
I’m not sure why. The pollen count, while not as high as it was, remains moderate. The wildlife smoke has abated but it’s possible that it could come back. And without my allergy medication, instead of being at the mercy of the elements, I seem to have passed the pain point.
I’m breathing easier, at least until hayfever season begins. Then I will likely have to get back on the Zyrtec.
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What you find
You never know what you’ll find in library books. I’ve found any number of pressed flowers and leaves, an old love letter, a dollar bill, and index cards and the occasional honest-to-gosh bookmark. I’ve never kept any of that stuff, because it wasn’t mine to keep and also because maybe the person who left them will come back.
Or maybe they should stay where they are, frozen in time.
Today I was at my local library, looking for my next few reads. I picked up John O’Hara’s “Collected Stories,” a book that I have been meaning to read for a long time. You don’t hear much about O’Hara these days, but he was one of the best-ever American short story writers last century. He was also someone who long lived in New York City (as I did) and was from northeastern Pennsylvania (where my family is from). Plus his “Appointment in Samarra” is also on my reading list.
Flipping through the pages, I came upon this slip, from Friday, Sept. 19, 2014, almost a decade ago. It was slipped into the pages, about halfway through the book, where the reader apparently stopped.
There were two books taken out that day almost nine years ago: “The Collected Stories of John O’Hara” and “Harlot’s Ghost,” one of the last novels written by Norman Mailer.
I don’t know what to make of that. There isn’t any other details about the person who took this book out before me, or whether this was the last time it had been out. I wonder whether I’ve ever done that, leave a due-date slip in a returned library book. And what would it say about me?
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Perspective
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Cormac McCarthy, who died June 13, 2023, in No Country For Old MenI think on these words a lot.
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Juneteenth
I have Juneteenth off for the first time.
The holiday has been around for a long time, ever since 1865 in Texas when United States Major Gen. Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom in the formerly Confederate state. It has been a state holiday in Texas since 1980. But it wasn’t until 2021 when it became a federal holiday.
My company made it official last year, with 2023 being the first time it was officially a day off.
But truth be told. I’ve got to do more.
And this is one thing to do, but not the only thing. From Juneteenth.com:One of the most important and immediately impactful actions anyone can take is to support black-owned businesses and organizations. These grassroots, ground-level contrbutions make a daily impact on work, quality of life, and growth in the community. Make a daily, weekly, and yearly conscious effort to plant your economic seeds and watch them grow.
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Show, don’t tell
Word of advice that I put on my new Chromebook, which has been serving as my main writing device the past several weeks:
Show, don’t tell.
I found this sticker online and I wanted to find a spot on the Chromebook so that I see those three words every time I sit down to write.
Powerful words, they are.
Sometimes, all you can do is tell. But if you want to really impact readers, have them really see it, you have to show.
I need to do more showing, less telling.
And, related: Less talking, more writing.
Those are two goals through the rest of ’23.
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Pushing a noun against a verb
One of the great scenes in “Inherit the Wind.” “You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.”
“Inherit the Wind” is one of the great plays of the ’50s and one of the great movies of 1960. It’s kind of stunning that it didn’t win anything at the Academy Awards. Putatively about the 1920s Scopes Monkey Trial, it’s also about McCarthyism and the 1950s, and 63 years after its release, it has a lot to say about the world we live in today.
The script and the play not only are first rate-dramas, but they offer so much in the writing. And the movie has first-rate acting: Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, Gene Kelly (yes, that Gene Kelly), Dick York, Harry Morgan. Tracy and March are at the top of their game, in roles of a lifetime of it wasn’t for the fact that they always brought the heat. Tracey plays the character named after Clarence Darrow, who has always been a personal hero of mine. (Here’s why.) York, who became well known on “Bewitched,” is outstanding as the teacher accused of teaching evolution in violation of state law.
I am blown away, though, by Kelly’a performance. He was already in some of the great movies of the late ’40s and ’50s including the groundbreaking “Singin’ in the Rain.” Kelly was what they call in Hollywood a multihyphenate – dancer, singer, choreographer, director and musical actor – but not known for drama.
Until this movie.
He was fabulous as E.K. Hornbeck, modeled after journalist H.L. Mencken. It’s this scene, sparring at the very end with Tracy, that Kelly shows he can go toe-to-toe with the best.
So good.
As a journalist, it’s also an object lesson, a reminder that your humanity is important in your search for truth. There’s such thing as being too cynical, to in Tracy’s words needlessly push a noun against a verb.
I don’t like to watch courtroom dramas as a rule, maybe because I have spent a fair amount of time covering the justice system. But “Inherit the Wind,” as well as “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” are exceptions to the rule. So is another classic, “Twelve Angry Men.”
All three from the ’50s, which if you look back is a lot less rosy and idyllic than collective memory suggests. And if you haven’t seen either “Inherit the Wind” and “Twelve Angry Men,” you should. They are the kind of movies not made anymore but should.
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Flag Day, a birthday
Yesterday wasn’t just Flag Day. Wednesday was what would have been the 83rd birthday of my eighth-grade English teacher, Kathy Clark.
Amazing what you remember, isn’t it?
Been a long time since I was an 8th grader at Coronado Middle School in Coronado, California. I was a transfer student from Connecticut, just me and my mom at first and a continent away from my father, grandparents and everything I’d ever known. I hadn’t ever been this far west, even for a visit.
Mrs. Clark was the first teacher I had who I considered more than just a teacher. All through elementary and middle school I liked my teachers but rarely if ever thought of them as having lives outside of school, even if I saw them in the community. But Mrs. Clark was different. She was a great teacher and communicated her passion for English to her students. But she also communicated her zest and passion for life, and all the wonderful opportunities it presented.
She, like many of us at Coronado schools, had grown up as the child of a Navy parent. She came to Coronado as a young girl in the early 1950s, left for a while because of the Navy, and returned for her senior year to graduate from Coronado High School in 1958. She was Miss Coronado that year, something she talked about with a smile. She shared other experiences in her life, which by the time I was in her class was about 40 years, a little less than half her time on earth. And I remember one day other teachers celebrating her birthday.
Flag Day.
Don’t know why I remember still. But I do.
I also remember a lot of the skills Mrs. Clark taught me that year, including a dose of grammar that was intense but also delivered in such a way that it stuck, and a love of the theatre, which she had and I did, too. I remember one of her projects, writing a letter to a company about an issue and getting a response. It taught us how to compose a business letter and to advocate for ourselves. I picked a life insurance company and asked for more information about its commitment to seat-belt innovation and safety. And they responded!
I left Mrs. Clark’s class with a love of English and the inspiration to read and write, even more than I did before. It would set me along the path of English and literature and writing classes throughout high school and college, to the point where I came this close to majoring in English (I took almost enough classes to do so) and helped prepare me for the career I have. And it was in my eighth grade year that I began in earnest writing stories, thanks to her inspiration and the fact that I realized I finally had something to say.
I left Coronado in the middle of 10th grade, headed back to the East Coast when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I lost track of all of my friends in Coronado in the next several years and it is the only part of my life that Facebook hasn’t re-connected. I had thought about going to college in San Diego but decided against it, and it wasn’t until 22 years later, when I worked for The Hollywood Reporter, that I ever got back to California. I was there twice since then, seeing the old places but not attempting to make any connections with anyone I used to know.
So it wasn’t until recently that I learned that Mrs. Clark died in 2015 after a bout with cancer. It’s hard, sometimes, to reconcile the younger person you used to know with a man or a woman claimed by cancer. I’ve felt that way with a number of friends and family members, including my mother, who died young. Mrs. Clark was the bright, full-of spirt 42-year-old woman who taught me so long ago. Time passes, whether we realize it or not.
Yet reading her obituary in The Coronado Times and a tribute from another teacher, I learned what I already knew: Thousands of Coronado Middle School students before and after me were also affected by her.
The obituary had a quote from Mrs. Clark, days before she died:
“I just hope and pray one student would have found some inspiration in what I taught,” she said. “That would make me happy.”
Mrs. Clark, you did. Thank you.
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The vanishing Internet prose
How can I make my words on the Internet last? Is that even possible?
I didn’t used to worry about this. For most of my journalism career, I rarely thought about the future of the newspaper stories I wrote. I worried about getting the story first, right and well-written. The next week, month or years into the future weren’t mine to consider. Print-era newspaper editors and reporters tend to think of today’s edition to be tomorrow’s bird-cage liner or recycling. It’s just the way it is.
Maybe once in a while I thought about what an historian might think of a story I wrote, uncovering it the next-generation archive, just as I wonder sometimes about my journalistic predecessors when I look at stories in old newspapers. But that was it, other than clipping most (but not all) of my stories.
Along the way, the daily newspaper mentality heightened to hourly, and then to moment-by-moment as the web and then social media came along. The pace of the news quickened, and with it, the ephemeral nature of scoops and stories. I didn’t have any expectation that stories of mine in the print-only era would be preserved, outside of a few microfiche rolls. But the web, ever-growing, would be different. Those stories, they would always be there.
Except they weren’t.
The dozen or so years of stories of my current employer remain online, and always will. They have a strong and good archive system. So are the archives of a former employer, Mediapost, where I was senior editor for three years in the early 2000s. A few of my newspaper stories remain online at the suburban New York daily newspaper I worked at in 2001 and 2002, the oldest of my stories to remain online.
But a large part of the work I’m most proud of, when I was a TV and media reporter at The Hollywood Reporter, has been wiped from the archives. Also missing are the stories in some of the syndicated partners, Reuters and Yahoo, where our stories were republished. Most of my stories from late 2006 to 2010 appear to be on the THR.com archives, although with the byline of “Associated Press” instead of The Hollywood Reporter. (That irks me, since I was on staff. Looks like a computer glitch.)
But all the work I did, several stories a day, between 2004 and mid-2006, they’re gone.
I’m not bringing this up because I care about my deathless prose. I’m proud of my work, but a lot of its value — most of its value — came in the hours and days after the stories were published. But I also believe in a record, expanding as it does every day, of what has happened in this world and why. How many other publications and writers’ work have been wiped away, either through a change in websites (like I think happened with THR.com) or when the outlets themselves closed? One magazine I worked for no longer exists, and all that work is gone.
I have copies of my Hollywood Reporter stories, so I’m not missing anything. But the cover stories I wrote for about eight monthly magazines, they’re gone and won’t ever come back. I don’t have physical copies of any but one. I guess I always thought they’d be there.
It makes me worry about the future. Whole publications, and work of writers and journalists and bloggers, have disappeared. And they won’t ever come back, and I am full of sorrow. Some of those writers, including people I know and love, have passed from this world. I wish their legacy, the voices they left behind, weren’t stilled too.
The past few years, I’ve tried to protect my own work, at least as much as I can. I long ago lost my published articles from the late ’80s into 2000, never making one of my many moves. I’ve been able to reconstruct some of them, thanks to visiting the library in Norwalk, Connecticut, where there’s microfilm of The Hour where I worked for a lot of that period. I’ve also been able to find about a year and a half’s work at other newspapers. But there’s a lot that I have no physical or digital copies of, and it’s probably not going to happen. One newspaper I worked, since closed, apparently has no archive anywhere. Another is collected in only one place I’ll probably never get to.
And my work at my first newspaper, in Connecticut near the New York border, is available on microfilm at a library or two. But how much time do I have to go through three or four years’ worth of daily newspapers?
I don’t.
What I do, from time to time, is work to collect what I can and save it digitally. Authory is a website that I pay for gladly, an archive of currently published material that can go back into online archives to extract and save journalists’ stories and even blogs and social media posts. I’ve done that for as much as I can, knowing that the first decade and a half of my career, that’s not possible. I’ve also been scanning articles here and there that are only available offline, and then putting them into Authory. It’s a massive job if you’re prolific, and one that I don’t have a ton of time to work on.
Authory is oh-so-worth it, in my opinion. It also creates a digital offline archive if wanted. I’m thankful that there’s such an option as Authory, and I’ve been pleased with the fast and perfect customer support.
It’s the only tool I have to try to preserve the past.
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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