One last word about trivia

On Friday, the St. Louis Pro Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists turns trivial for a few hours to again sponsor its annual "Hacks vs. Flacks" trivia competition.


Despite the title, anyone with a mind for mundane facts and figures is welcome to participate, at $20 a head or $150 for a table of eight. There will be munchies, cooked up by SPJ faithful, plus beer and wine to facilitate trivial thinking and help start the weekend right. And there will be the added benefit of watching the cream of St. Louis-area media and public relations try to show how much they really know. (Hint: their knowledge varies greatly.)

But the reasons for this trivia contest belie the name. The chapter's chief goal is to raise money for student scholarships and programs such as a monthly luncheon series where special guests speak about new ideas and current events. It's hoped these scholarships and luncheons give the media and other communicators additional tools to do their jobs — or just find jobs. Because today, every little bit we can do to help the protectors of civic fairness and democracy is welcome.

So, please, come by at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow to Immaculate Conception at 2934 Marshall Avenue in Maplewood, Mo., to lend some wisdom and have good cheer, all for a very good cause.

The dad who never died

It was odd timing that two socially relevant icons of popular culture passed away within the week. Barbara Billingsley, the mother on "Leave It to Beaver," died Saturday. Tom Bosley, the father on "Happy Days," died today.

Both represented characters who were stereotypical of their television times — the doting, devoted housewife and the insightful but lovably stern father. Both symbolized elements of a stereotypical family norm that neither existed in the 1950s nor is pervasive today. And though the roles were not meant to be permanent, the impact of June Cleaver and Howard Cunningham continue to impress decades later.

I arrived on the world scene a little past the point of understanding or appreciating who June Cleaver was. Howard Cunningham, however, was central to my life in the 1970s because "Happy Days" dominated the Nielsen ratings about the time TV turned for me from being noisy living room furniture into societal touchstone. My friends talked about the show the mornings after each episode aired, their friends talked about the show, and over time we began dressing like the characters at special school events and parties. In sixth grade, I did a long project with written report, photos and a slide show of the 1950s' impact on the 1970s, inspired no doubt on the impression "Happy Days" left on me.

It was during this time, while conducting interviews for the project, that I learned about June Cleaver, the "Leave It to Beaver" craze and how the show seemed to make a cultural impact on people similar to what "Happy Days" did on me and my generation. And what I came away with from those interviews was this: TV alternately unifies and divides us. It can show us the faith, hope and compassion of humanity through worldly characters such as June Cleaver and Howard Cunningham while portraying an ideal of life we can't hope to emulate. Life is life and Hollywood is Hollywood, and though Hollywood may imitate life the reverse cannot be said with any certainty.

My grade-school friends who watched "Happy Days" — those in particular who came from broken homes — on occasion wished aloud they had dads just like Howard Cunningham, a guy who seemed to trust that his children would learn valuable lessons from their mistakes, and when they didn't would ride to their rescue dispensing the kind of earthy wisdom they didn't expect him to have. They believed in him, because he believed in them.

How many children of the '70s, or today, can say that or would admit it about their own parents?
That's why for me and my generation, Tom Bosley's role as Howard Cunningham — or "Mr. C," as The Fonz called him — remains as rich and relevant now as 35 years ago. Many of us still wish, deep down, we had a dad just like him and wonder, as parents, if we'll be anything approaching him.

That's why Tom Bosley may be gone, but Howard Cunningham lives on.

Taking my work with SPJ one step further

As president of the St. Louis Chapter for the Society for Professional Journalists, my job is simple: assist journalists in doing their jobs and trumpet their successes. As a committee member with SPJ national, I work with others around the country to do the same on a much broader stage.

A portion of that stage will be here, on Posterous, one of the must-visit lifestreaming sites on the Web, and another trumpet heralding new ideas and experiences. Journalists the world over are encountering new technologies and challenges in their jobs — among those challenges, the rise of social media and public newsgathering. Some would say this rise creates interference for traditional newsgathering practices that defined credibility and dependability in the larger media. Others welcome the broader reach of information sharing by everyone, not just traditional media, hastened by fast-evolving technical innovation.

Regardless, both views will find a voice in this space, and perhaps other voices will have their utterances recorded here as well. The key is finding ways to make social media and technology work for journalists, not the other way around. Because when it comes to being heard in the 21st century, intellect must trump ignorance, facts must trump fallacy, and sound judgment must trump noise; otherwise, our wonderful and varied means of communication, no matter how advanced, will devolve from tools into toys. And our republic will follow suit.

Return engagement

This wasn't what I expected — a big gap between my previous post and this one. At least not a gap of such prodigious size, prompting friends to wonder aloud if I dropped off the planet.

In response to all of them, no. I'm still here but my list of obligations has been reordered. That gaming blog I wrote? Gone. The technology writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch? Not a daily thing anymore. I continue to edit sports, or try anyway, though the still-tenuous state of newspaper journalism has made the job seem as essential as buckboard repair.

So, what prompted the shift in status? Look down a few dusty entries to the one marked "SPJ," the moniker of the Society of Professional Journalists. I went from local programming director to chapter president in one leap and now have much more on my mind than gaming and gadgets.

There remains, however, some space in my head for those things, and when they spill out a couple blogs should catch them. One encompasses a concept that remains in development. The other involves a national SPJ committee I joined while attending the society's annual convention in Las Vegas.

In time, you'll see more of my musings in this space, just not with yawning spaces in time between them. If your opinion of me is favorable, this is a good thing.

Right?

Cold-brewed conundrum

The girl was uncomprehending, her face unlined but for the soft crinkle above her nose. She had mixed the ingredients for a large, cold-brewed vanilla latte but produced something much less than a large-sized beverage.

In the “large” transparent cup was only enough fluid to fill a container half its size, foam topping included. The girl — she preferred the title “barista” — knew exactly the proportions for a drink of this size poured over ice. I had asked for the drink without ice, or whipped cream topping.

She stared at the cup a moment and, finally, said, “I’m not sure what to do about this. I mean, you’re like asking for it without ice, and we always include ice. I mean, the recipe calls for it.”

“So, is this a problem?” I replied.

“Well, um, no ... not exactly,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t know the amount of ingredients to put in without the ice.”

The 20-ounce cup was holding what one would suppose was 10 ounces. I guessed at a glance she could double the mixture and not risk overflow. But then, I never have been a barista; there may be a complexity to the job that escapes my estimation. Also, someone behind the scenes might keep score on things like this, comparing amounts of fluid poured to the amount of money in the cash register.

I once held a job where exactly that kind of someone existed. For two summers during high school, I bagged groceries and helped stock shelves at a supermarket near home. The least appealing part of that job — besides rounding up abandoned shopping carts in the parking lot on 110-degree days — was re-shelving the items called “go-backs,” or merchandise people deposited around the store because they couldn’t be bothered with returning it to its proper place.

Maybe they would pick up a box of white rice instead of the brown rice they needed and realized their error four aisles later. Or maybe they decided they didn’t need rice after all. Onto the nearest shelf the rice would go, even if that nearest shelf was reserved for allergy medicine. Restocking go-backs involved cruising the aisles looking for out-of-place goods and putting them in a cart which I later emptied item by item when customer traffic was slow and I wasn’t needed to bag at check-out.

One colleague, a bagging veteran from way back, was more particular than most about the condition of the go-backs. Yes, some go-backs were damaged goods, dropped by customers who then didn’t want dinged cans or bent boxes. If the seals weren’t broken, they went back on the proper shelf anyway and discounted at the register.

This colleague, however, possessed a particular talent, he claimed. He insisted he could discern accidental from intentional damage — that is, he recognized which packages were torn and their contents consumed, which in the vernacular of the grocery business amounts to shoplifting. And, he believed he could tell who was doing the consuming, the customers or the employees.

Late one night as my shift was ending, he directed me to the storeroom adjoining the large outer entry where we unloaded inventory from trucks, reached into a small basket of damaged goods, pulled out a torn bag of Reece’s Pieces and said, “I know this is your doing. I saw you reach into this and grab a handful and eat it. I’ll have to report this to Merlin,” the supermarket’s general manager, who was not in the store at the time. Then the accusatory colleague dropped the bag back into the basket, scattering candies on the other goods and the floor, and bolted in three large steps through the storeroom door before I managed even a whimper of defense.

There’s a moment when a person meets an unfair charge or claim with sensory confusion as the brain tries to assess what the eyes and ears have presented against logic or belief. It’s the instant when one could be, as the saying goes, “knocked down by a feather” and not notice. One moment, your surroundings make sense and an assumption forms that they will remain in this order until you change them. The next moment, something unexpected kicks out the feet propping up this assumption and the brain hesitates like an engine with a drop of water in its fuel line.

Well, once my synapses resumed firing I moved to answer this allegation. When I caught up to him, the colleague refused to stop what he was doing to face me. He seemed certain of the charge and unconcerned with my response, a fluctuating mix of incredulity and outrage. Then he leveled another charge, still without looking at me or stopping what he was doing, that I wasn’t spraying the produce with cool water enough times to suit him.

This was the “pile-on” — a claim against procedure intended to suggest I was irresponsible and likely to be criminal as a consequence.

The colleague did not know at the time I had specific instructions on the care of produce that was given to me by our mutual supervisor, who already had left for the night. He also did not know that peanut butter was not among my favorite foods, so stealing Reece’s Pieces was nonsensical.

My parents were prepared to explain all this to him, and the general manager, the next day. They made an appointment to do so. The colleague, however, called in sick soon afterward. He called in sick the next two days, too. He looked fine to me though when he made his accusations.

After three days, he didn’t call. He didn’t show up again, either. By then, the general manager had dismissed the charge against me without prejudice. I continued working; the colleague, if I recall correctly, turned up at another store on the other side of town.

I doubt the barista with the coffee conundrum needed to concern herself with comparable banality. After looking at the half-filled cup, she said, “Well, I can give you a little more coffee or a little more cream, or I can split the difference, but I’m not sure how it’s going to come out.”

“How about a little more coffee?” I asked.

She reached under the counter into a small refrigerator and withdrew a carafe of coffee, poured until the tan-colored mixture turned a couple shades darker, then pulled out a quart container of cream and poured just enough to restore the drink’s original color. I presumed then that company policy dictated adherence to appearance over recipe.

Regardless, the drink tasted fine. I presume that’s all that mattered.

Her struggle ends

The last time I saw my aunt, Joyce Sheets, she was in her rocking chair, head tilted back and to the left, her silver-gray hair mussed by the head bands of an oxygen mask that she wore all the time by then. A portable respirator clicked softly from a metal stand next to her.

This was November — no, maybe December. Sometime right before Christmas, I’m sure. She was dressed in loose clothes, a housecoat and a blanket for her legs and feet. Two big down-filled slippers poked out from beneath the blanket. On her face, were bug-eye-frame glasses propped up not so much by her nose as the oxygen mask. Her face looked almost too small for those glasses.

But it was the eyes behind those glasses that drew my attention. They were bright and small and tired-looking. They told you she was still alive, still fighting, still thinking up bad jokes. But they also told me they had seen enough of all this, of the housecoat and those slippers and that infernal breathing machine that was a closer friend to her now than her husband and children. The world around her rocking chair was small. Full of love, mind you, but very small, and shrinking with each breath.

If you were to name the cruelest diseases known and list them with the worst in first, ALS has to be atop that list. It became famous for making Lou Gehrig a martyr and, somehow, a sports hero, though even he said there was nothing heroic about showing up at work every day.

No, real heroism arises after the farewell speeches. ALS robs sufferers of their ability to reach, hold and touch, so they can’t hug their children and grandchildren. It eliminates their mobility, so they wind up in wheelchairs or rockers, looking up at the pity flowing down onto them. And later, when every other motor function becomes a memory, ALS moves in on the lungs, resisting sufferers attempts to expand them.

My aunt once told me, in the rasp that had replaced her speaking voice, she felt as if she was always exhaling, always wondering whether her next breath would ever come. Her mind operated on two frequencies: in and out. That is, until her grandchildren were in the room. She felt then that her suffering was justified.

On Tuesday, my Uncle Les roused Joyce from her night’s sleep and prepared her for the day. He lifted her out of bed, helped her use the bathroom, bathed her and dressed her. He had learned to primp her hair, and she said he was doing a pretty good job at it. Then he made breakfast for both of them and sat at the edge of the kitchen table feeding her — one bite for her between every two bites for him.

This whole process from first kiss to last bite took nearly three hours, and it exhausted both of them. So Les carried her to the rocking chair about 12 feet distant, tucked her in and kissed her again. “I’ll be in the next room taking a nap, too,” he said.

It’s an old rocking chair with velvet flowers on its cushions and bare wooden arms. I used to sit in it to do college homework while babysitting my cousins Jennifer and Cynthia. Long before that, when I used to imagine rocking chairs were horses, I rocked back wildly and tipped the chair over with a crash. The frame fractured and thereafter the chair squeaked when it rocked — a raspy squeak much like my aunt’s enfeebled voice.

The chair sits at an angle to the rest of the furnishings so that the person in it can glance to the right and see a collection of family photos — baby pictures, graduation pictures, wedding pictures — atop a desk transformed long ago into an oversized photo album. Informal  snapshots stick out at all angles from the frames of formal portraits, and they’re all of smiling, laughing, playing children. I imagine that Joyce, her head lolling right on an almost useless neck, could see the smiles, hear the laughter in her mind, and agreed that whatever happened next was justified.

SPJ is my life, now

I'm writing a new chapter in my life by leading a chapter – the St. Louis-area chapter of SPJ, the Society of Professional Journalists, to be specific.

Election was easy; nobody else wanted the job. Installation this afternoon at the chapter's monthly luncheon was just as effortless. The current president pointed to me, announced I'm the lone candidate, asked if everyone in the room was OK with that, and upon hearing no objections declared the handover of power official and passed the gavel.

(Our group does not own a gavel; however, a cliche seemed a fair punctuation mark for that sentence.)

In fact, my one-year responsibility does not begin until June, but before then the current president will mount her formal campaign for regional SPJ chairman and needs room on her schedule to build a policy platform.

This is not to say we take chapter responsibilities lightly, passing around board memberships like copies of this morning's newspaper. SPJ remains an important resource to the local news-gathering community by showing ways that veteran journalists and budding ones can improve on their craft and deal with the changes wrought by technology and the Internet.

Rather, we'd like to think the quick transition represents an eagerness to move forward and impress how interested St. Louis-area journalists are in the state of the industry. Having the current chapter president move now into the regional chair, and subsequently a seat on the national board of directors, helps raise St. Louis' profile within SPJ.

As for me, I'd like to just see more faces to meetings, increase membership, brainstorm for ideas on bringing more online journalists aboard, and help out-of-work journalists continue to practice their craft to its fullest potential. I'm not sure how to do all of that just yet, but as ideas arise this vehicle may be the first place they see light.