Quasi-famous Jim

Job status update

2010-06-08T00:26:00.000-07:00

A quick post (OK, maybe not so quick) to let those who care know how my job situation has changed:

We had been told last month that Aug. 15 would almost certainly be the day Scripps would make the changeover to outsourcing the copy desk to Corpus Christi and therefore ending our jobs.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, they brought into the conference room and basically said, they ain't ready. Apparently, we don't yet quite have the technology and they can't make it better than it was before. The computer gobbledy-gook needed to transmit all this stuff back and forth between California and Texas isn't going as smoothly as they'd hoped. The only paper that's online with this thing is a considerably smaller paper in Redding and they're having a lot of trouble.

They didn't give us a new date for our demise, but I figure it has to be at least good for another month or two. On one hand, it's nice to still be employed for a while longer. I like that idea. So does my wife; it's the very thing she and her friends have been praying for (in fact, they're praying it gets so bad, they give up on the idea altogether and just keep the lot of us). On the other hand, this is making "leading us on" into an art form. It's hard to function well with something like this looming over you. It's nearly impossible to think about looking for another job until this one ends because if we leave early, we forfeit whatever severance package there may be (another thing they won't tell us much about).

I like what I do. I want to keep doing it. I like where I work and for whom. On many levels, things are very status quo. On other levels, they're anything but.

In the meantime, we have a great bunch of copy editors. The other night, when the news about the death of John Wooden broke at about 7:15, all of us plunged right in, ripping apart and rearranging not one, but two sections of the paper. I had already written an appreciation column the night before and two of our writers were able to get great local reactions. I told our news-side editor, only half-joking, that our coverage looked so good you would have thought Wooden had died much earlier in the day.

We are incredibly professional in a very trying situation. Nobody beats us on that. Our copy desk rocks.

And there are even things that have gotten better lately. I'm writing more than I ever have and getting more compliments about it, too. I'm going to get to cover the baseball All-Star Game in Anaheim next month, assigned to it by the managing editor (which means he has to be reading my stuff, right?).

And just when I think no one cares, I'm proven wrong. At church on Sunday, no fewer than three of the pastors asked me about my situation. Just out of the blue. Even when I'm not faithful, God is.

Waiting for God's timing is incredibly hard to do. God wants us to be patient while at the same time not making us that way. We have to fight our impulses in order to follow his. It's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time.

Which I continue to do, with His help...

"Santa Clara State" and other Cal Poly adventures

2010-04-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

Time to get this blog back to its stated reminiscing purpose. I was thinking the other day about my first real job out of college: sports information director at my alma mater, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

The first year I was out of school I became the women's sports information director at Cal Poly. I did a really good job, considering it was 1979-80, women's sports were relatively new and I was the first person to ever hold the job. Cal Poly women's sports got a lot of media attention in the area that year and that was mostly because of me (and also because Poly had some pretty good teams). But at the end of the year, the women's athletic director decided to get rid of me, and this was mostly because I was male and she had already decided which female she wanted to replace me with.

So I became ... the men's sports information director. Not sure why, if I wasn't good enough to be the part-time women's SID I was good enough to be the full-time men's SID, but that's what happened.

They didn't make the decision to hire me until about a week before the first football game and I was never able to get up to speed. I was still trying to put together the football program for the second week of the season when I was with the team in Greeley, Colo., for the season opener against Northern Colorado. And of course, in 1980, this was anything but a computerized operation. I lugged my portable typewriter along with my suitcase while the entire team sprinted through the old Denver airport O.J. Simpson style because we had gone to the wrong gate while trying to get home.

My biggest adventures that fall had to do with getting the football programs printed. I had already sold all the ads during the summer while waiting to see if they would hire me full time. Most of the pages in the program stayed the same from week to week; others changed with rosters and stories for that week's game.

The biggest complication was that the printer was located in Santa Maria, 30 miles south. He was a booster and one of the few printers who could handle it. But this meant early deadlines and having to describe layouts over the phone to him (again, no computers, no e-mail. It's hard to imagine now how anything got done at all).

I had to drive down to Santa Maria to pick up the programs, about 1,000 of them, each week. I had commissioned an artist to draw portraits of the five players I wrote features on during the season. The covers looked great -- except the week I arrived and the printer told me he realized too late he had put the wrong name on that week's cover. Right picture, wrong name.

But he had a solution: He had made 1,000 stickers to put over the names. All I had to do -- for some reason, it was me who had to do this, not him -- was put the stickers over the name on each cover.

So that night, I licked stickers (yes, they were the lickable kind). And my parents licked stickers. And my grandmother licked stickers. And my next-door neighbor licked stickers. We got them all done and no one complained -- except the people who had done the licking.

Another week the printer said he was going to be a little later than normal with the programs and could I please come to his house that evening to get them. Well, that seemed OK since he lived in Nipomo, a little town about five miles closer.

Nipomo's a pretty rural place, or at least was then. I followed his directions and drove into this driveway to this somewhat rundown house. The only doorbell I saw was next to a sliding glass door. There was a long pause before the outside light was turned on and a woman opened the door. I asked her if this was the Smith residence (not their real name; I'm not trying to protect them; I just don't remember it!) and before she could answer, a man slowly emerged at the door from my right. He had a double-barrel shotgun.

He asked what I wanted. Surprisingly, I was able to tell him. I told him I was looking for the Smith residence, that he was a printer and had some football programs for me. He said he thought they lived across the road. I quickly, and as calmly as possible, said thanks and got in my car. All the time as I was backing out of the narrow driveway, I was saying quietly and rapidly to myself, "He's got a gun! He's got a gun! He's got a gun!"

The Smiths were very surprised to find out their neighbors across the road had a shotgun.

Cal Poly made it into the NCAA Division II playoffs that year and its first home playoff game was against Santa Clara. I suddenly realized I was going to have to come up with as many as two more programs. I called a few advertisers to see if they would continue for a smaller publication and I figured out what I was going to put on the cover for the game against Santa Clara. I sent the photo down to the printer and told him over the phone what the text on the cover was going to say.

That week I had 1,000 beautiful glossy programs. They looked great. But they said "CAL POLY vs. SANTA CLARA STATE." Santa Clara State?! Santa Clara is a Jesuit school near San Jose. My life flashed before my eyes.

I told the athletic director, who was a very kind, quiet man. He was the kind of man who, when he got angry, seldom showed it. He was angry. You could tell by his eyes. And maybe the wisps of smoke coming out of his ears. But he apologized to the Jesuits on behalf of his idiot 24-year-old sports information director.

There wasn't a single day the whole school year when I was SID that I didn't do something for that job. Saturdays, Sundays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, every day. It was very difficult to get a handle on a job I had been given only a week before the first football game. And when Cal Poly got into the Division II football championship game, it was even tougher. The title game was in Albuquerque, N.M., where I had relatives, but I don't think they even knew I was in town. I barely knew I was in town.

Cal Poly beat Eastern Illinois for the national championship on a game televised by ABC and I remember I got to join the team for a big dinner afterward, followed by the New Mexico-Arizona State basketball game at the Pit.

San Luis Obispo went bonkers about the Mustangs finally winning the title after having come close in the playoffs several times before. On top of that, SLO High won the CIF football championship that same weekend at Mustang Stadium. When our buses arrived on campus, there were a lot of people there that night to welcome us back.

Or I should say welcome them. All I did was get off the bus, go to my office and desperately try to put together a season preview for the basketball team.

The basketball coach and his team hated me. Mostly because they never saw me. I had been so busy with football I never had much of a chance to do much for basketball.

The basketball team was almost just as successful as the football team, advancing to the 1981 Division II Final Four in Springfield, Mass. It was televised by this fledgling new TV network, ESPN. The four sports information directors gathered at a Springfield to meet with Sam Rosen, the play-by-play announcer, and his analyst who had just joined ESPN, Dick Vitale.

Yes, Dick Vitale has always been that way: Loud, enthusiastic, over the top. I came to the Final Four with a "Postseason Media Guide," but it was really just a 10-page mimeographed news release. Looked more like a term paper than a media guide.

Cal Poly's president was Warren Baker, just hired then and soon to retire now. Vitale knew him from the University of Detroit where Baker had been president and Vitale had been basketball coach.

"You tell Warren Baker he needs to spend some dough to put out a media guide!" Vitale said. He was trying to rib his former boss, but Baker had nothing to do with it. It was my fault we didn't have a media guide.

Cal Poly wound up finishing third in the Final Four (they actually had third-place games in those days). After that game, we drove to New York City where our flight home was originating. We spent one night in the Big Apple, but I was sick as a dog. All I remember is driving in Manhattan in order to return the rental car and walking back to the hotel in less time than it took me to drive. I stayed in the hotel that night while everyone else was out on the town. I remember seeing Patton on TV that night. First time I'd ever seen it. Still one of my favorite movies, even though it brings back bad memories of my only time in New York.

They consolidated the two SID positions at the end of the school year and told me I'd have to reapply. I interviewed, but it was clear they didn't want me. I wound up leaving and getting my first newspaper job at The Daily Press in Paso Robles, where I was the sports editor and also the sports staff.

But that's a story for another time.

The Lingering Limbo

2010-03-27T00:17:00.000-07:00

It's truly hard to know how to respond to what things are like at work right now. If you read this blog (and already we've reached the realm of fairy tales), you know our copy desk people at The Star were told in February that our jobs were going to be eliminated in May or June. For more than a month now we've been waiting for more news and Thursday we got some.

Or at least those of us who were there got it. News like this usually only comes when I'm off like I was on Thursday. But apparently, this was sort of an impromptu meeting. Those who were there were told -- I'm told -- that our jobs are now expected not to be ending until late July or early August.

In most ways, this is very good news; if you have to choose between being laid off and not being laid off, you'd pick not being laid off. But on the other hand, we're still not sure exactly when our jobs will end.

Not knowing is difficult. It's kind of like finding out a loved one is terminally ill. You're hit with sadness, maybe some denial, a few weeks of panic, but then realization there's no sense in panicking. What's going to happen is going to happen. You just don't know when it's going to happen.

So I guess what's happening now is like your loved one responding to chemotherapy -- at least for a while.

(My goodness, this is a depressing analogy, isn't it?)

There's definitely some relief. You feel like you've bought some time somehow and maybe you can even talk yourself into thinking you can cheat death.

OK, enough death analogy.

It's a strange existence we have at work these days. We're all, for the most part, still doing our jobs the same way we always have. I'm still writing my columns even though our primary -- and best -- columnist, David Lassen, has already been let go. I've got survivor's guilt even though I won't apparently survive forever.

Our routine is pretty much the same, although our work schedules have changed with only three of us in sports designing pages now. Consecutive days off still happen, but not as often.

Our sports editor, Jon Catalini, was also let go, so now our writers have been divvied up between two supervisors. However, we copy editors technically aren't anywhere in the organizational chart. We have no boss. We can do anything we want. Mm-hmm. Right.

At this meeting, our group was also told that if we reapplied for any of our jobs, which are being outsourced to Texas, we would make the same amount of money we do now. Unfortunately, we would still be in Texas.

One of the affected copy editors on the news side found out today he had won the annual chainwide headline-writing contest. Good for him. He won $1,500 for it. Apparently, he's good enough to be the best headline writer in our entire chain, but he isn't good enough to keep from being laid off.

Surviving another birthday

2010-02-26T15:06:00.000-08:00

Fifty-four.

That’s the age I turned Thursday, although the day itself aged me considerably more than that. It was almost comical. It WOULD be comical if I hadn’t been the one going through it. But since you’re not the one who went through it, maybe you WILL find it comical, and that’s why I’m writing about it.

It wasn’t a good week for someone to be entering his mid-50s. I kept reading about people in their mid-50s suddenly dying. Mosi Tatupu, who played football for the Patriots and USC, dead at 54. Yipes. Therese Rochette, the mother of Winter Olympic figure skater Joannie Rochette, died suddenly in Vancouver of a massive heart attack at 55.

I had to work on my birthday this year, which isn’t all that unusual in my job. I’m certainly not complaining; I had two days off before my birthday and another after it. But Thursday was crazy.

I started writing my TV-Radio sports column for The Star as I usually do on Thursdays at about 7:30 a.m. I had to kind of rush it this week because I had a dentist appointment scheduled for noon. Whatever possessed me to schedule a dentist appointment on my birthday I don’t know, but it was one of the few days my hygienist had open, so I did it.

This week I was writing about the Universal Sports network. It’s a cable channel NBC owns part of, which has recently become based in our circulation area, in Westlake Village. The network is doing some Winter Olympic programming from both Vancouver and Westlake. I got invited to tour the facility and meet its president.

I had also hoped to talk to David Michaels for my column. He’s the executive producer of Universal Sports, directs NBC’s Olympic figure skating and gymnastics along with other things. He lives in Westlake Village, which makes him local — and is also the brother of NBC’s Al Michaels, which makes him even more interesting. David’s always been great to me and treats me like I work for the New York Times or something. But I knew he was busy — the women’s figure skating final was that night — so I wasn’t sure he’d be able to answer the e-mail I’d sent him.

I finished my column, and the TV notes that go along with it, without Michaels and scurried to get ready for my dentist appointment. I was almost literally out the door when my cell phone rang. It was David Michaels. I took out my recorder, put my phone on loudspeaker and did a quick interview. It was really cool that he called me and I think my wife Karen was kind of impressed that he would call me back like that and she also heard the friendly way he talked to me. You can always use some points like that with your wife!

Of course, there was a traffic jam on the 101 on the way to the dentist, making me about 10 minutes late. But I got there and found, to my chagrin, that everybody at the dentist’s office knew it was my birthday. The dentist, after telling me that before long I might need to have a wisdom tooth taken out (I’d rather leave them in if I can; I need all the wisdom I can get! Who knew wisdom came from your teeth?), brought me back two birthday “gifts” she found in her office: a little model airplane and a bottle of what she called “manly” body wash with the office’s logo on it.

This is all going on while I’m in the chair with the hygienist cleaning my teeth! The dentist noted that one of the ingredients of the body wash was goat milk. The hygienist then said something about how male goats attract female goats by peeing on themselves, so she wasn’t sure how good this “manly” body wash would be. Again, all this is going on while my mouth is wide open with instruments in it and the suction thingy hanging out of it. My eyes were getting wider with every comment, moving from one of them to the other.

I finally got out of there. They gave me a little bag for my stuff (toothpaste, toothbrush, floss, model airplane, “manly” body wash) and I headed for the office.

When I got to the office, I discovered a deflated Mylar birthday balloon and a stuffed monkey on my desk. Apparently, somebody was given this gift a long time ago and it has since then shuffled from birthday person to birthday person. It was nice, unless you’re sorta kinda trying not to draw a lot of attention to the fact that you’re now 54 years old.

I had to get in a little earlier than usual, partly because of stuff I had to catch up on, partly so I could incorporate David Michaels’ comments into my column. I got everything set up, then took out my recorder. To my disgust, I found that when I had put my phone on loudspeaker, it caused interference on my recorder and most of Michaels’ comments were unintelligible. I was able, however, to salvage a little bit of it and make it work.

With our staff being cut through sudden layoffs (our copy desk is being outsourced to Texas, which means I’ll be losing my job in May or June, and our sports editor was laid off effective immediately last week) and the Winter Olympics going on, our shifts have been pretty stressful recently. We were almost a half-hour late in getting the section done. By the time I left the office at about 11:45 p.m., my neck and shoulders were very sore.

Eesh. It definitely hadn’t felt like I’d had the previous two days off, but I’m really happy I have today off. As I write this, the plan is for my wife and son to take me out to dinner tonight and I’m thinking there will be some Wood Ranch beef ribs in my future.

The best thing about my actual birthday on Thursday? The amazing number of people on Facebook who wished me a very happy birthday. It was even more amazing when I went back today and counted them up.

Fifty-four!

Laid off

2010-02-17T09:38:00.000-08:00

As some of you already know, I found out last week that my job is going to be eliminated in May or June. Although people may know that I write for The Star, my job is basically to be a copy editor. The E.W. Scripps Co., the chain that owns our paper, is consolidating all the copy desks (i.e., the people who design the pages and put the stories and photos on them) for the papers it has in the Western states into their paper in Corpus Christi, Texas.

What is happening is that in order to cut costs -- something all newspapers are desperately trying to do these days -- Scripps is eliminating all the copy desks at its papers in Ventura, Redding and Bremerton, Wash. The people being laid off are being offered jobs in Corpus Christi, but as you can imagine, few if any will decide to move to Texas.

It is definitely a shocking and rather incomprehensible move. Local reporters will be writing their stories here in Ventura County. Editors on the city desk will edit them and then tell people in Texas how they are to be laid out. It sounds so strange and so desperate.

On top of all this, we found out this week three more are being let go as well, including my boss and our sports columnist, who has been at the paper for 25 years.

This, obviously, is going to be a traumatic thing for our family as well as the 17 other people losing their jobs at The Star and I'd really appreciate your prayers. I've been at The Star for 26 years. We're fortunate that we've been able to save some money through various means over the years. We're not like a lot of other people who are living from paycheck to paycheck. But anything like this is very scary. The job market is very thin and even more so for journalists/writers.

A year ago last November, we had some other layoffs and at that time, I sent out an e-mail to the whole newsroom (a unusually bold thing for me to do) and told them "The will of God will never lead you where the grace of God can't keep you." I still believe that and know good things are in store, even though it may be difficult to see how now.

I'll write more later about the day it happened and feelings I have about all this. Not that you're necessarily dying to know all this, but it'll help me with the grief process (and isn't that one of the things a blog is for?). That process right now is still a little too raw to express, especially after the additional cuts this week.

Last Word on Late Night

2010-01-24T20:01:00.000-08:00

I'm not telling anyone who watches late night TV anything they don't already know or anything they haven't already been told, but I do write about broadcasting and maybe that gives me a right. (OK, I write about sports broadcasting, but this is only a blog; lighten up.)

Late night TV has been important to NBC for almost 60 years. From Steve Allen to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien. All of them were broadcasters of the highest order and understood the importance of hosting live television 5 nights a week (or in Carson's case 4).

The last 5 years, however, NBC has done all it could to completely ruin one of the medium's biggest franchises. No, this didn't start in the last month; this started when NBC executives decided Conan should succeed Jay. For some reason, Jay agreed to it. Conan's run on "Late Night" was ended and the nearly talented Jimmy Fallon took his place.

Unfortunately, 5 years is a long time and by the time we actually got to it, Jay's ratings were still good and he decided leaving really wasn't something he wanted to do.

Also by this time, Conan was thinking this 11:30 gig was going to be really cool. NBC was right there with him. They moved his people to L.A. and built a enormous, cavernous studio for him, not in Burbank but at Universal City.

But Jay's griping about leaving -- and possibly going to another network -- scared NBC and started making the execs think of ways they could have their cake and eat it too.

At the same time, NBC, and its parent company GE, was slogging through a really bad time in prime-time ratings and, in this economy, losing money. It didn't matter that the amount of money NBC was losing was a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money GE makes every year; losing money was losing money.

Somebody thought of a solution to solve both problems: Put Jay on at 10 p.m. 5 nights a week instead of those really expensive prime-time dramas.

At first glance, I liked this idea, primarily I have decried the elimination of the network variety show, such as "The Carol Burnett Show." "American Idol" is as close as we come these days, and it's not close to being as good as the old shows were. Show business is on the decline and the end of the variety show a big reason why.

But it didn't work. Jay's show was awful. I have no idea why, but it was incredibly worse than his "Tonight Show." It was like taking a 1-man show that plays pretty well in a coffee house and putting it on Broadway. Exposed to the light, every flaw showed.

In time it might have done better. Meanwhile, Conan did OK. It was much better than the ratings showed, but I admit it: I was watching David Letterman more than I was Conan. Conan would've gotten more viewers as time went on. Jay had the same early growing pains that Conan was going through before he overtook Dave. Seven months was not long enough to evaluate what Conan's performance.

The thing that really forced NBC's hand, however, were the local stations. They had no problem with Conan; their problem was with Jay. Jay historically had done everything he could to boost affiliates; whenever he did club gigs in their towns, he'd go and meet the station GM and do some promotional work for them. But he was killing them now. The ratings for his 10 p.m. show were so much worse than what the prime-time dramas were getting, the local newscasts weren't getting any kind of carryover in the ratings. Some stations that were No. 1 in news at 11 p.m. were now No. 3. The affiliates were up in arms and some were threatening to put other programming on in place of Jay.

NBC decided they needed to pull the plug on "The Jay Leno Show." but once again, instead of just canceling the show and being done with it, it tried to keep everything: the dramas, Jay and Conan. And for some reason, Jimmy.

The execs’ solution was to put Jay’s show on for just a half-hour at 11:35, put Conan on at 12:05 and start Jimmy at 1:05. Jay bought into it like a good trouper, but Conan decided that to move “The Tonight Show” to 12:05 would really ruin everything the show has been since it started, i.e., the First Show of Late Night. Instead of moving the show, Conan decided he would move.

That has led us to the incredible amount of snippiness in the media we’ve all been a witness to and to the cancellation on Conan’s show, which ended Friday night.

OK, so let’s evaluate:

Jay? Good broadcaster (something I deem important), good guy, has only tried to do what the company wanted him to do. The easiest, and maybe classiest thing would’ve been for Jay to bow out gracefully, but he didn’t and really can’t be blamed for not doing it.

Conan? Also a good broadcaster, good guy, was promoted by the network with hype that no one probably could fulfill (how many people get a whole studio built for them?), and saw himself as custodian of an American treasure, even more than his employer did. Conan is the most talented member of this cast and NBC will regret getting rid of him.

NBC executives? While I had no problem with them taking the prime-time dramas off at 10 p.m., a lot of people did (especially the producers of prime-time dramas). Like I said, putting Jay on at 10 didn’t seem that bad to me, but it turned out horribly. Of course, once a show gets an reputation, it’s hard to break it. What NBC did was the stuff of clichés: They were guilty of wanting to have their cake it and eat it too and of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It’s a mess. We don’t know if Jay’s “new” “Tonight Show” will be as good as it used to be, now that his 10 p.m. has been so bad and we don’t know if he’ll get back to his Dave-beating days again. We don’t know what Conan’s next move will be. We only know he can’t say anything about NBC or give any interviews for a few months or start a new show on another network until September. Somehow, Jimmy survives, although I can’t figure out why. Dave enjoys higher ratings, but who knows for how long? Fortunately for NBC, the Winter Olympics will provide a literal cooling-off period.

But as I heard a TV critic say on the radio the other day: More people have been talking about all of this than have been watching it.

Reunited and it feels so good...

2009-10-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

It's funny how getting together with high school friends for a reunion can make those years seem so much better than they actually were. Looking back makes you realize that things were actually pretty good.

Teenage angst keeps you from appreciating a lot of things. Fortunately, by the time I graduated from San Luis Obispo High School, I had a pretty good appreciation of my classmates.

I really looked forward to driving "home" this weekend -- after 26 years away, San Luis is still home. My parents passed away in 2001 and 2002 and I just hadn't had a lot of reason to go back. It just wasn't practical. I need to be less practical.

Many of my classmates attended the Friday night football game (wow, you mean alumni really do return for homecoming?) and then went to the gathering at the Veterans Memorial Building afterward. We didn't get up there in timeto do that (and maybe I have a diversion against attending events in buildings that have giant cannons in front of them), but there was still plenty to do on Saturday.

It began in the morning with a brunch at the high school cafeteria. This is not where we had our cafeteria. The building they eat in now used to house business and home economics classes. I have to admit: I had never been in the building before.

In some ways, the brunch was the best part of the weekend. For one thing, it was much more low key than the reunion event itself. There wasn't a really loud band playing and it was easier to talk to people. Several of our old teachers were there (and yes, I do mean old) and it was great to see them. The scary thing was that a lot of them didn't look all that much older than we did.

So many of them had taught at SLO High for three decades of more. That is rare now and it was rare then too. San Luis Obispo is a rare place.

After the brunch we went on a tour of the campus. The place we used to hate to go to never looked so good. And so big! With most of us having had kids who have gone through or are going through high school, we know how concrete-bound most campuses are. Conan Nolan put it best, as Conan would: "This place is pastoral."

So much has changed, so many new buildings have been built. But so much was the same too. I'll tell you one thing: If any of us had remembered our locker combination, we could've broken in. Those lockers hadn't changed in probably 40 years!

After an afternoon break (and at our age, most of us needed a nap!), we met at the Elks Club for the big event.

Now then: I'm not one to complain, but Elks Club? Veterans Memorial Building? School cafeteria? Only place we didn't get to was the Grange Hall! I went with my wife to her San Gabriel High reunion last year and it was at the Pasadena Hilton. Aren't there any nice hotels in San Luis Obispo? No, seriously, meeting at the places we did was great. Those places say a lot about who we are and how we were brought up. And I always love partying at a place that has antlers!

Remember how we congregated in cliques in high school? Some of us kind of did that again Saturday night, myself included. But not exclusively. It was funny how much Facebook figured in this reunion. In fact, there were some people -- particularly Jayne McClung Bauer, who left SLO before graduation and who I didn't really know while she was there -- who I now know more from Facebook than from high school! She came over to introduce herself at the reunion, but I already knew who she was.

Facebook really helped me "prepare" for this reunion, to tell you the truth. I was geared up better for how people look now, for what women's married names were now, things like that. That prevented me from seeing some people and having my jaw hit the floor (never a tasteful reflex). It wasn't foolproof, however. At one point, I'm pretty sure I called John Belsher "Roger Schoepf."

I was impressed and somewhat surprised by how many people still live in San Luis Obispo or nearby. But only somewhat surprised. Most people, when I tell them where I grew up, ask me: "Why did you ever leave?"

Spouses who didn't go to the same high school deserve a special reward for going through reunions, and my wife Karen was wonderful: taking pictures and doing a pretty good job of keeping track of names. The best thing she did Saturday night, however, was tell me I looked like one of the youngest people there! Not sure I believe that, but what a great thing to hear.

Some of us looked young, some of us didn't. Some of us have smiled a lot over the years, some of us haven't. Some of us have had a lot of things go our way since we left high school, some of us have had a hard life. All of that shows. But all of us are precious and it was a wonderful time to see each other, no matter what we looked like.

We saw, we hugged, we ate, we danced, we laughed. We clung to each other like we wish we could've back then. I tried to tell several people during the day how much they meant to me back then, how much they still mean to me; how impressed I was with them in high school, how much I'm impressed with them now. Events like these don't mean much if you don't communicate appreciation.

On Sunday morning, we went to church, to the First Baptist Church on Johnson Avenue where I spent so much time as a kid and as a college student and as a young adult. There were only about five people who recognized me from those days, but it was great to connect with them again.

It's amazing how much the personality of the church has changed. In a college town, a lot of people come in and out of a church, students and families both. The building was the same and I was sitting in the pew thinking not much else was.

Then I saw it: the offering envelope in the pew pocket in front of me. On the front was a small line drawing of the front of the church. I had asked a friend in our college group who was an architecture major at Cal Poly if she would draw that picture of the church. The church liked it so much, it wound up using the drawing for a time on its stationery, its bulletin covers, just about everything. And here it still was, 30 years later, on the offering envelope in my hand.

It was the only time all weekend I cried.

Media provocation, not information

2009-09-11T23:42:00.000-07:00

The passing of Walter Cronkite, and the clips of his career highlights, made me realize again how much the news media has changed since the day I decided to become a journalist.

There's no doubt Cronkite's career paralleled a remarkable time in our history: man on the moon, civil rights, the Vietnam war, the assassinations of three iconic figures. And I remember how mesmerized we were as he led us through all of those events. It strikes me how coolly Cronkite described these things to us, live on the air.

I still think the mark of a true broadcaster is how well he can handle these kinds of events as they're happening; how well he can edit on the fly as information is being handed to him, as he is seeing live or just taped pictures and describe them.

The trick that so many of today's newscasters miss is just stating facts. Just stating what you know. Not speculation, not commentary. Just what you know. Beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Today CNN went on the air with the notion that the Coast Guard was firing shots at boats in the Potomac River. It turned out to be a drill (perhaps the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks wasn't the best day for the Coast Guard to have a drill like this, however routine, but it was still a drill), but CNN went with it because on the radio scanner it was listening to it sounded like more than a drill.

All that is is a news organization trying to get a scoop before it really has all the facts. CNN said "it would have been irresponsible not to report on what we were hearing and seeing." It was irresponsible to report solely on the basis of a police scanner.

This all goes to show how 24-hour news channels have changed what media consumers believe news is these days.

Commentators like Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs and Nancy Grace are pawned off as de facto newscasters on us, when all they are is news commentators, pundits.

There is no one out there telling us the news, certainly not on cable TV anyway: not Fox, not CNN, not MSNBC, no one. Even CNN's Headline News, which used to be just that: headline news, has a slogan now of "News and Views." The NBC, CBS and ABC evening news programs still do a pretty good job, but have a hard time drawing viewers now.

People just want to be entertained, they don't want to know the news.

And all the news channels do -- every one of them -- is provoke us, they don't inform us.

None of us knows anything anymore.

We've got this huge debate/barroom brawl about health care going on in this country right now, a fight that has erupted into violence at town hall meetings and even caused a congressman to heckle the president of the United States speaking to a joint session of Congress.

No one really knows anything about what anyone is proposing because all the news channels are doing is provoking us, instead of informing us.

I hope you will notice that I've tried very hard not to tip my hand on how I feel about the health care debate. I just wish news anchors would do the same thing. CNN and MSNBC are known -- known! -- for being liberal, just as Fox News Channel is known for being conservative. They wear those labels proudly. It's shameful. If someone is on TV purporting to give us the news, we should never know anything about their opinions.

I'm a sports reporter, but even so, no one in my newsroom knows which way I lean politically. But I know way too much about what many of them believe. Agreeing or disagreeing with them isn't the point. I shouldn't know, period.

I'm frightened for our country because ignorance has turned into disrespect. I'm afraid soon it will turn into hatred.

The Adventures of the Junior Deacon

2009-08-30T23:49:00.000-07:00

When I was in college, I was a deacon in our church, the First Baptist Church of San Luis Obispo. Actually, I wasn't a real deacon. I was a junior deacon. I got to be involved with stuff, but couldn't vote. Kind of like Puerto Rico.

I'm not really sure what a junior deacon was supposed to do, but it should've involved a decoder ring. I really wanted a decoder ring.

One thing I did get to do as a junior deacon was help serve communion. Our church had communion on the first Sunday of each month. There's nothing biblical about having communion the first Sunday of the month; in fact the church we go to now has it on the last Sunday of the month. Jesus just said, "This do in remembrance of Me," so we apparently figured once a month was pretty good.

Serving communion was a big production number at our church. To tell you the truth, it wasn't all that complicated; it was just that any time old guys had to get up and move around during a church service, it involved more choreography than a Broadway musical.

Being a deacon meant that on Communion Sunday, you got to get up out of the pew a few minutes before the pastor finished his sermon and go back into the narthex to line up (the "few minutes" might be more than a few if the sermon wasn't all that great). Then, when the communion hymn was sung, we came down the left and right aisles and stood on either side of the two pastors at the front.

The pastors would take each tray with bread and pass them down until each deacon had one. Somehow there was always a matching number of trays and deacons. This was because the deaconesses were in charge of setting the whole thing up and they were much better at math than the deacons were. If the deacons had had to set up communion as well as serve it, we would've run out of stuff about two-thirds of the way through the congregation.

Then four deacons would start from the back with their trays, four deacons would start from the front and we'd meet in the middle. Nobody ever said anything about it, but it was very competitive as to which group would serve more people: the front deacons or the back deacons. Usually the front deacons did more because a lot more people would sit in the back than in the front. This is where the term "Back-Row Baptists" comes from. We'd serve the bread first, march back up, get the trays with the cups and do the same thing.

Now then: I say "bread" and "cup" because that's what they're referred to as in the Bible. In reality, the "bread" was kind of a small, very bland cracker and the "cup" was a little plastic cup filled in grape juice. The deaconesses had this nifty little squirter thingy to pour the grape juice into the cups.

People laugh at me sometimes when I talk about "deaconesses" at our church, and I agree, it does sound kind of weird. There aren't a lot of things that we put "-ess" on the end of anymore when referring to women. But that's what we called the female deacons -- deaconesses.

My mom was a deaconess for a while. The deaconesses did a lot of thankless work around the church: dinners, showers, other social gatherings. And of course, communion.

Well, I don't know whose idea it was -- whether it was a deacon's, or a deaconess's, or a pastor's -- but someone decided having crackers for communion instead of bread was weird (they never had such thoughts about having grape juice instead of wine; the line of reasoning stopped with the bread). So one month, the deaconesses baked some bread, cut it into little squares and divided them equally into the trays.

Real bread for communion! What a great idea!

So that Sunday, we all lined up as usual and the pastor started handing out the stacked trays, one by one, to the deacon standing next to him. That deacon passed it to the deacon next to him, and so on down the line until it got to the deacon on the end.

But what no one had thought of or discovered beforehand was that the bread cubes would stick to the bottom of the tray above them! We didn't realize it until they started falling to the floor, one by one, as the trays were being passed to the deacons.

I realized something had gone horribly wrong because my friends from the college group always sat in front, and I noticed how big their eyes suddenly got, and how they were all now trying not to laugh out loud during one of the most solemn times in any church service.

I quickly saw what the problem was, along with my fellow deacons, but none of us knew what to do! We couldn't bend down, scoop them up and put them back in the tray. They'd already been on the floor! Everybody'd seen it. Not even the Back-Row Baptists would want those.

So we just left them there and walked up the aisle with what we had, praying that Jesus would once again perform a miracle and multiply enough of this bread to feed our large crowd. We didn't even have any fish.

Somehow, it worked. We had just barely enough for everyone. When we returned to our lines, however, we noticed the bread wasn't on the floor anymore.

While we were gone, the pastor had picked them up and put them in his coat pocket!

Being a junior deacon wasn't always this exciting, but it did have its moments.

Extended family

2009-08-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, my folks used to take me on long vacation car trips to see relatives. My mom was from Texas and my dad was from Mississippi, so it took forever to get there. This, of course, was before cars had much in the way of air conditioning (or at least before we had it) and these trips were almost always in the summer, so the vacation pretty much consisted of three people in a moving pressure cooker traveling across the country.

Looking back on these trips, it strikes me how much we did them on the cheap. We hardly ever stayed in a motel. Somewhat remarkably, we had enough relatives spaced just far enough apart to where we could freeload the whole way through.

Leaving from San Luis Obispo, we'd first stay with my grandparents in Los Angeles, then travel from L.A. to the Phoenix area where my mom had an aunt and uncle in the wonderfully named town of Apache Junction. From there we'd stop in Albuquerque at my aunt and uncle's house. After that there were more relatives in Texas and Louisiana before you'd finally get to Mississippi.

But when you'd hit Texas, Texas would hit back. You'd zoom across California, zoom across Arizona, zoom across New Mexico, but then you'd be in Texas. For days. And days. Texas was so big, and so flat, and so hot.

My mom grew up in Childress, which is in the southern part of the Texas panhandle, almost near Amarillo, but not near enough to where it would do any good. We stopped there one time when I was about 12 and met a bunch of cousins and such for the first (and in some cases only) time.

To say it was a culture shock is understating it. I almost wrote just now that the main drag of Childress probably wasn't all that much different from where I'd grown up. But it was. It really was. They did have stoplights, a few anyway. But only one per intersection. It was suspended from the very center of the intersection. On two sides, the red light was at the top and the green light was at the bottom, like I was used to. But on the other two sides, the green light was at the top and the red light was at the bottom, so that only three bulbs were actually needed to make it work. It makes sense, but to me just that, and the fact that the stoplights were painted yellow were enough to already make me feel like I was in a foreign country.

The stores along the main street were mostly mom-and-pop businesses, with a few bigger ones sprinkled here and there, like a J.C. Penney or a Woolworth, maybe a Sears Roebuck.

What really made my jaw drop, though, was when we actually got off the main drag and headed to my relatives' house. Very few of the residential streets in Childress were paved in those days. They were dirt roads, and it was a very, very red dirt that seemed to get everywhere. There were red ants crawling around too, something I'd never seen before. After getting the proper warning to stay away from them, I found myself looking at the ground everywhere I walked to make sure I wouldn't be attacked by a colony of red ants, which I was sure would completely envelop me and carry me off into their underground ant hill, where they would feast on my carcass for weeks.

It was hot and windy in Childress. I don't remember much about the inside of my relatives' house, other than it seemed rather dark inside. Most of the time we sat out on the wooden front porch with my cousins. Frankly, I don't recall too much about them, except for one female cousin (a second or third cousin), who was about my age and let's just say, way out of my league. I knew she was my cousin, but she was about the only thing worth looking at in Childress.

On the same trip, we visited a great aunt of mine in another Texas town. It was a pleasant enough visit. She had a very bright, air-conditioned house, a much better environment than Childress -- and while we were there, she had a baseball game showing on her TV!

For me this was great. Entertainment! Baseball! Something other than listening to family history! It was a Houston Astros game (later on this same trip, we would see a game in the Houston Astrodome, just to show you this trip wasn't all bad) and they were playing the Braves in Atlanta.

This gave me something to do while my parents and my aunt talked. I soon became quite absorbed in the game and was paying very little attention to the conversation.

However, during a lull in their talking, my aunt happened to look over toward the TV, just in time to see it showing Hank Aaron swinging a bat over his head in the on-deck circle to loosen up on a hot, sunny day in Georgia. He held the bat behind his shoulder blades to stretch his muscles.

My great aunt, who had no idea who Hank Aaron was, had no idea that he was one of the best ballplayers of all time, smirked at the picture.

"Look at that nigger, just stretching himself!" she said. "He just thinks he's sooooo great."

Now then. That word may not have been nearly as insensitive back then as it is now; it was used quite a bit in the South in those days, mostly as a denigration of the word "Negro," but it was still a racist thing to say and my aunt knew it.

Being 12 years old and meeting this woman for the first time, I didn't really know how to react. I'm sure my parents were both hoping I'd say nothing. And I didn't. But that moment has stayed with me to this day.

We don't get to choose who our relatives are. Some of them are treasures, some of them are not. Up until that moment, I had liked my great aunt and was enjoying our visit. Her remark, however, sort of knocked the wind out of me.

As I said, my dad was from Mississippi, born and raised in McComb. I remember another trip there, in my high school years, and seeing the black part of town. It was all so different from California, at least the part I'd grown up in.

I know I had a relative who was in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. I even have a badge from his regiment that was handed down to me. I used to think it was a bad thing, to be related to someone who fought for the wrong side in the Civil War. Having been to the Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago has made me realize that there were a lot of gallant men who fought for the South. But the idea that this relative, whoever he was, was in favor of slavery is still kind of hard for me to wrap my brain around.

No, we don't get to choose our relatives. People have asked me why I don't research my ancestry. Maybe it's because I'm scared of what I'd find.

A blooper -- or a Taco Bell menu item

2009-08-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

At Cal Poly I was a broadcast journalism major. I had this idea that I could be a great broadcaster. But at Cal Poly, they had a "learn by doing" motto that did a pretty good job of preparing you for anything. So in addition to broadcasting, I did some newspaper writing too. Good thing, as it turned out.

I was on the news staff at KCPR-FM, Cal Poly's radio station, in the mid-'70s. The main purpose of the news staff was not so much to go out and report news as much as it was to get comfortable with reading news copy on the air. The news-gathering operation consisted primarily of the news director going over to KSBY-TV and gathering as much wire copy as KSBY could spare and bring it back to the station for people to read.

Every weeknight at 6 we would go on the air with the news. One person would read the world news, another the national news, still another the state news, sports, weather, and so on. We filled a half-hour with this stuff, along with a few local stories. People would shuffle in and out of the studio during the breaks.

One night I had the world news, which I was delivering in my best Walter Cronkite manner. One story was about the Glomar Explorer, a ship built by a Howard Hughes company, which was being used to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.

This had been an ongoing story and the gist of it this night was what the ship had recovered. The line I was supposed to read said the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped torpedoes."

What I said was the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped tortitos."

Now, I have no idea what a "tortito" is, but saying it caused me to crack up. I guess I had this picture of a gigantic, spicy Mexican dish at the bottom of the ocean in my head and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The two other people in the studio started laughing too and pretty soon it was a full-on disaster. The engineer cut the mikes and finally went to a break.

It was really funny at the moment, but not so much afterward where I understandably got some criticism for the whole thing. One thing is clear: I certainly will never forget the Glomar Explorer.

Of course, that wasn't the only funny thing that happened at KCPR. One night one news reader set fire to the copy the other news reader was reading, causing the second news reader to start reading much faster before his "hot" story burned up.

During one summer, I was actually the news director. There was a girl at the station who had perhaps the worst broadcasting voice I've ever heard. It was extremely high-pitched, almost shrill. Not only that, but she had an awful habit of reading everything on the wire copy: the dateline, the "AP" designation, all the stuff that was in parentheses that you weren't supposed to read. I don't want to say she was ditzy or anything, but I guess I just did. I also won't tell you her name, primarily because I can't remember it.

I tried to coach her before one newscast to try to have better transitions between her stories. I told her to say things like "Turning to California news..." before she started the state news so people could tell she was going from the national news to the state. I could envision that taking her "under my wing" would help her tremendously.

So she started reading her national news in her shrill, monotone "style" and when she got to the end of it she said, "Turning to California..." and she literally turned her body in her chair a few degrees before reading the next story.

Many of the people at that station went on to brilliant careers. "Weird Al" Yankovic was one of the disc jockeys at KCPR. Others probably went on to careers where they were more likely to serve nuclear-tipped tortitos.

Dieting: Would you like guilt with that?

2009-08-05T16:41:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to think about dieting again. I've kind of gotten into this cycle of dieting a few months before my next doctor's visit. That way my extremely dour doctor (I call him Dr. Chuckles) won't be quite so dour. Then for the few month after my doctor's visit I can be a little freer about what I eat.

So far it hasn't worked out too badly. I've lost the weight I wanted to before the doctor trip and, since I wind up seeing my doctor in the months of November and May, I can eat what I want to eat during the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays and during the summer.

But while I'm actually dieting and exercising in the months before the doctor visit, it's gotten kind of rough. I'm not nearly as pleasant to be around then (this is assuming there are other times when I am pleasant to be around).

Scientists have discovered that there is no longer anything that is good for you. Everything is bad. Especially when it comes to food. Apparently the only thing worse than starving to death is eating. So dieting in essence means taking all the things you really like to eat and banishing them out of your life completely. One of the reasons it takes me months to lose enough weight to make Dr. Chuckles happy is because I have to get my mind into the denial mode. It takes a while, a week or two, to get enough will power into my head to actually get going, to where I can get past the french fry withdrawals.

There is so much guilt associated with dieting. You feel guilty about being hungry. You feel guilty about eating. You feel guilty about what you're eating. On top of that, I'm diabetic, so I feel guilty about not eating.

I'll feel good one minute about having a salad instead of fries, but then I feel guilty for having the spicy chicken sandwich instead of the grilled chicken sandwich.

And yes, I know what I should be doing is eating healthy year-round. But I don't. And I feel guilty about that too.

Then there's the rationalization that goes on when you diet: trying to come up with reasons for why you're eating what you're eating. Well, I can eat this big dinner because I hardly had any lunch or breakfast at all. Well, I can have dessert because I was a good boy and ate only good things the rest of the day.

And I won't even get into the guilt I feel about exercising (well, I will, but not now).

The non-dieting times are not only more fun because I eat more the way I want to eat, but they're better mentally because I'm not dealing with so much guilt and rationalization! I have enough guilt going on in my life as it is without adding the stuff I'm putting into my mouth to the list.

Now I'm feeling guilty for saying that.

Being funny gets tougher

2009-07-30T22:56:00.000-07:00

I have this thing about wanting to be funny. I really like making people laugh.

Not sure exactly how that started; probably discovered I could do that in high school and it made up somewhat for not being popular. I remember being able to make a dripping sound with my mouth in my math class and how great everyone thought it was that the teacher would look up at the ceiling trying to find a leak on a perfectly sunny day.

I've never been much for telling actual premeditated jokes. I'm much better at responding in a funny way to what other people say. Some people call that wit. I don't usually do that, having found it doesn't take a lot to add half- or nit- to -wit.

I do find that as I get older, it gets more difficult to be funny — or at least to be perceived as being funny. In my mind, I'm a riot. Other people's, not as much.

It's more difficult to be funny at work. I think it must be because I'm getting older. No, wait a minute ... because everyone else is getting younger. Yeah, that's it. Someone'll say something and I'll come back with a dynamite snappy retort. And then I just get "the look." It's a look that says, "OK, we're going to smile and nod, not wanting to insult you, but hoping maybe you'll go back to your own desk now."

Finding my medium's been a problem, too. When I worked at KVEC Radio in San Luis Obispo about a hundred years ago, the program director told me I was more of a visual act. Considering I was in radio then and in the newspaper now, I may have followed the wrong calling.

In any case, I still love making people laugh. There isn't a better feeling in the world. Well, maybe one or two better feelings. But not many more than that. OK, three tops, but that's it.

Miss you a bunch

2009-07-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

"I missed you."

People say that all the time, but I'm not always sure they mean it.

I just got back to work from vacation. No one said it to me and that's OK. Most people probably didn't even realize I was gone. Last time I told someone at work I missed them during their vacation, they looked at me funny. Apparently this was an emotion that was a little awkward at work.

On the other extreme, I've also had people tell me "I miss you." While I'm there. Usually, it's a situation where I don't see this person very often and they're expressing the fact that they'd like to see me more often. Usually, I say something like "How can you miss me? I'm here."

Which reminds me of the country song "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?"

Back when I was Wes Parker

2009-07-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Back when I was a kid, I used to listen to just about every Dodger game all summer. I'd go out in the back yard, turn on the radio and pretend I was a player.

Best guy for me to be was Wes Parker. He threw left-handed, I threw left-handed. He played first base, I played first base. He was good-looking, I was ... left-handed.

I had two sweatshirts that I cut the sleeves off of, one white for home games, one gray for road games. My mom was nice enough to sew Dodger patches on the left sleeves and that was as close I got to playing for the Dodgers.

In fact, that's pretty much as close as I got to playing baseball at all. Never played Little League even though many of my friends did. Just never thought I had the talent to play; certainly never had the self-esteem. And my folks never pushed me in that direction.

But baseball has always been important to me. My mom was a huge Dodger fan. I always used to say the reason I became such a big fan was because the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series when she was pregnant with me. I'm sure her yelling and jumping up and down influenced me while I was still in the womb.

When I got older, I still listened to nearly every game. By then I was really into scoreboards. It sounds kind of silly, but I've always thought scoreboards were cool. I always liked how they record history every night and always had a thing about uniform numbers and how they'd be displayed on the scoreboard.

I accumulated a huge amount of those preschool magnetic letters and numbers and put together a replica of the Dodger Stadium scoreboard that I fashioned from looking at photographs.

Not only this, but I would also imitate the Dodgers' public address announcer, John Ramsay. I got to where I knew the uniform number of every player in the National League.

Wow, was I a geek or what?

Writing columns

2009-07-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

I won't profess to be the best columnist in the world (or even at my newspaper), but I do enjoy it. It's the best part of my job.

Red Smith said to write a column all you have to do is open a vein and bleed a little. But I think the best columns (or at least my best) nearly write themselves. They're the ones that take almost no time to write. They just pour out.

The start of it all

2009-07-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

People have told me (OK ... a person has told me) I should do something like write my memoirs. Well, I told them I'd have to be famous to do that. They said I was a local celebrity. I replied that if I was a local celebrity, I'd be making more money.

Still, they insisted it would be cool -- and perhaps therapeutic -- to put down a few of my reminiscences, not just about work but about life, and maybe a few things from my columns.

I think this person was telling me to do this primarily because they want to convince me that maybe I am at least somewhat famous. Semi-famous.

Quasi-famous.

So, we'll see how this goes. Not sure anyone'll read this. Not sure anyone should. But I hope you do.