Otterblog

When I was growing up in NY/NJ, we used to track the weather with mob hits. OTTERBLOG Sr.’s theory was that when it got incredibly hot and humid, there would invariably be some outrageous mafia killing in New York or Brooklyn. Right out of the Godfather, blood and pasta across the checkerboard tablecloth, etc. Then the weather would break and it would be much more tolerable. In retrospect, this seems pretty callous, but the idea in one sense was that these killings were unfortunately entertainment for the rest of the world and after a week of temps in the 90s, it was the final straw that broke the weather camel’s back. The tabloid newspapers—the Post and the Daily News—would be all over these stories. In July, there wasn’t much news to compete with it, and readers ate these stories up.

I get the same sense of splendid detachment from our series that is running on the shooting death of Z. Smith Reynolds 75 years ago. It’s a v. good read/summer diversion and if not exactly relevant to most of our lives, is just entertaining and interesting—as well as a nice history lesson on how W-S came to be the place that it is.

Check this out: I’ve been in a long-running debate with several friends about whether the Simpsons movie coming out this month will be worth it. I remain unconvinced. But anyway, on the site for the movie is a v. cool program that allows you to create a Simpsons character that looks like you.

We ran a news obituary on Sunday about the death of Sam Moss, who for many years ran Sam Moss Guitars on Burke Street.

The death of a guy who sold guitars isn’t front-page news, but it’s worth covering in this instance. News obituaries are a chance to take stock of a person’s life and how he or she fit into the fabric of our community.

I bought the only guitar I’ve ever bought from Moss. A 1953 Gibson acoustic with a slim neck and a big sound. My son bought his guitar—a strange Japanese-style electric—there also right before the store closed. Moss was a character, with his wild shrub of hair waving this way and that, his erratic and sporadic hours, and his incredible knowledge of guitars. Basically, he was cool. Not celebrity cool. Just cool.

And in the death of his scruffy store there was in a sense a larger symbol of our city’s change. The Arts District was booming, big plans were in place for the West End neighborhood where the guitar shop was. But this little remnant of an arts scene that didn’t quite conform to all the conventional rules didn’t make it. And neither did Sam Moss.

In another Sunday story, we took a look at the question of Winston-Salem’s arts legacy and future, and despite all the good reporting and analysis, the story makes clear that it’s uncertain whether we are still the city of the arts. But I do think that all the questions about shaky finances and crumbling buildings and leaky roofs and West Side Story and RiverRun miss some of the more subtle intangibles about the success of arts communities. It’s that they are welcoming for characters, the eccentric people who don’t quite fit into anybody’s vision, but are still important. For lack of better words, it’s about our heart and soul.

It’s not quite the Million Man March, but getting 2,500 people to march in Yadkinville on a beautiful Saturday in late April is still an amazing feat. The occasion was a rally to get the Yadkin County Commissioners to change their position and allow sectarian prayer before their meetings.

I find this debate really interesting. For all the talk about liberals vs. conservatives and godlessness vs. god-fearing, it’s really about how we as a country and as individuals interpret the constitution and set values. And civil debates about the constitution should be encouraged. Again, the First Amendment is a mighty, mighty bit of writing, and I don’t think it’s a sign of weakness or vagueness that we’re still trying to figure out what our framers meant in those 45 words. I’d like to think that James Madison and Co. are getting a chuckle and nodding approvingly somewhere.

Our principal reporter on this issue says she gets called frequently and asked to help out. And she politely tells people that’s not her job—to advocate for either side. What we can do and try to do is to explain each side’s position as well as the legal history of this issue to date and the political and policy implications. 

As a backgrounder, I’ve included a link to Marsh v. Chambers, which is cited by both sides as supportive of their positions.

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One of the great things about a newspaper is its institutional memory. Some of it is carried around in our brains. But a lot of it resides in our library and our clip files. While we were looking at pictures of the Hanes property on South Stratford Road yesterday, we came across this photo from the 1950s. it is looking North, and it is before the hospital and the mall and Thruway were built. 

For as much as all the iterations of RJR have oozed with native pride, it’s largely been run by people not from around here for the past 30-some years. Ross Johnson. Lou Gerstner, Andy Schindler, Susan Ivey. Ty Wilson and Paul Sticht.

Sticht died today, at 89. He was a corporate chieftain like few others, at a time when what was R.J. Reynolds Industries straddled the globe. The path of RJR from tobacco company to conglomerate to LBO poster child for greed to holding company to smaller, more focused, independent company is a neat dovetail with the history of late 20th Century capitalism. And Sticht, who started out in the steel business and later moved to soup and retail, was the catalyst and in some ways the main character in the company’s rise, fall and rise. Johnson, with his larger-than-life personality and extravagances, gets a lot of the billing, but for my money, Sticht was the great Roman tragic figure in all of this.

We wrote about this extensively in the late 1990s with our Lost Empire series. Sticht is the aging monarch who turns over too much power to a young turk (Johnson) who has curried favor with him and sown discord about the other heir (Wilson). The results are dramatic for the company and its hometown, and the aftershocks still get felt today.

When it comes to car factories, North Carolina appears to be a perennial bridesmaid. As we noted today, Toyota chose Tupelo, Miss. (yes, it’s the whole Elvis thing) over a bunch of other places, including a site in Davidson County.

Despite Detroit’s problems, car factories are still silver tunas, especially Toyota plants. One of my favorite sites, the Rural Blog, which is run out of the University of Kentucky journalism school has an interesting piece on the role the newspaper in Northeast Mississippi played in the recruitment effort. The paper is called the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, and it’s goal for the past 50 years has been to tie that corner of the state together into a viable region for growth.

Our regionalism efforts here aren’t quite so robust or consistent, but the competing counties do work together much better than in the past, and it’s becoming more the rule than the exception.

The news pages of newspapers (as opposed to the opinion pages) have always done a balancing act when it comes to being a part of economic recruitment. I look at the Journal’s coverage of Dell’s move here, or more recently, The Charlotte Observer’s reporting on the Google incentives. We certainly understand that growth means—or has the potential to mean—more readers and the like, but being a cheerleader is a difficult role for many of us.

One other interesting tidbit about the NEMJ is that it is a rarity, an independent newspaper that is owned by a foundation, in this case the Create Foundation, which does community work in that part of the state. Private owners can be just as demanding as public shareholders, but as newspapers look for new ownership models in this day and age, other ways of doing business are worth considering.

A week or so back, we reported on a naming study done for the city of Winston-Salem that said that the city could make a lot of money if it sold naming rights for the coliseum. At this point, it’s a non-starter. Scott Sexton also wrote a column about it.

The Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum has been a controversial name since the very beginning, and the Journal has often been the focus of the controversy. A caller today screamed at me for the way we refer to it in the paper, Joel Coliseum (Most other media and WFU also refer to it like this). The calmer interpretation of what he was saying is that by removing the V and the M part of the name, we are not honoring the other men and women who served and died for this country.

I disagree. First, the journalistic argument on the name we use. It’s one of clarity and it’s how most people refer to the coliseum. Occasionally, someone says they saw a concert or a game at LJVM, but it’s almost always just Joel Coliseum or Lawrence Joel. The opposing argument would be that if the newspaper—and all the other media—had called it by its full name from the very beginning, we’d all be doing it. Language adoption rarely works like that. Clarity and simplicity find a way.

Second, the emotional argument. This goes back to the original fight over the name and the decision by the aldermen at the time to elevate one man above the others, while still adding these other parts in a Christmas tree fashion that was sure to cause confusion down the road. Political solutions to emotional issues rarely leave all parties happy. Lawrence Joel is our only Medal of Honor winner from Winston-Salem. He’s also black, and the elevation didn’t sit right with some people at the time and still today. In a sense, the full name honors three groups of people in the military. First, all veterans. Second, those who died in service. Third, Joel himself. Some people are in one category, others in two. Joel, himself, in three.

What I like about calling it Joel Coliseum is that that naming forces you to focus on one person and his bravery and courage. That said, I don’t believe it demeans or excludes other vets or those who died in service. If anything, it personalizes the sacrifice each of these people—even those who don’t have a coliseum named after them—have made.

The Darryl Hunt saga is in so many ways the story of Winston-Salem. Not the only story. But a story that can be used to tell the larger tale of Winston-Salem’s growth and change during the past 20-some years. The murder of Deborah Sykes happened about 18 months before I arrived in Winston-Salem, but my time at the Journal has overlapped with the rest of the events. And when I left in 1988 and then returned to Winston-Salem in 1993, it was still evolving and would reach a new critical phase shortly thereafter with the battle over DNA results.

The Journal has covered the story and been part of the story. Sometimes at the same time. Today’s story about the negotiations between Hunt’s legal team and the city about a settlement is but the latest twist in this drama. Now, it’s about more than admitting wrongs or acknowledging mistakes. It’s about money.

There’s a legitimate question about “When does this ever end?” But it doesn’t have to be a question posed in exasperation.

There are certainly many people who want to move on, who think the healing is done and it’s time to close the book. Others don’t want to be told when they’ve healed, and that they will decide when it’s over.

At some point in the State of the Union speech last night, I started trying to count the blink differences between Nancy Pelosi and Dick Cheney. Maybe, it’s just the shape of their eyes, but I could swear that Pelosi was blinking about four times more frequently than Cheney...It also seemed a little odd that the President waited until the final moments to say “The State of our Union is strong ...” Usually, that’s at the top.

If you are like me and spend most mornings before it is light hunched over an inside page in the Journal’s feature section doing the Sudoku puzzle, you can thank (or curse) Michael Mepham.

Mepham wasn’t exactly the creator of the Sudoku (the puzzle originated in Japan), but he was responsible for bringing it to the West and the puzzle’s popularity is testament to his reputation as a dazzling puzzle master.

Mepham died on Sunday in England. He was 62. Here’s the obit, from The Telegraph.

I have preached about the elegance of the Sudoku puzzle before. It is all logic. There’s none of the initial guessing of the Cryptoquote, or the need to know obscure words and trivia that goes with the crossword puzzle, or the tolerance of bad puns for the Jumble. It’s just you and your mind (one of my favorites is the baseball sudoku in ESPN magazine.)

Every once in a while I’ll do a Sudoku puzzle online. There’s about a jillion sites out there. But it is just plain more fun to do it in the paper. The email we received from Mepham’s syndicator says his assistant will pick up where Mepham left off.

And now a special holiday offer from Otterblog. As puzzlers know, the Sudoku comes in four levels, 1-4, with 1 the easiest and 4 just flat out brutal. If you have solved a level 4, send me your step by step solving method for the day involved. The first person to send me a solution that doesn’t involve trial and error gets a Journal coffee mug, and I’ll post the answer and the puzzle so others can see how it’s done.

It’s not much of a stretch to say that Sheriff Bill Schatzman owes his election to the Journal. The newspaper spent a lot of time in the 1990s investigating the misdeeds of his predecessor, Ron Barker, and it’s these reports that gave Schatzman plenty of ammunition when he ran again Barker in 1998 and then successfully in 2002.

That said, the newsroom doesn’t care who is sheriff. We just want people do their job. Our story today about how Sheriff Schatzman chose to punish himself for a departmental offense offers an interesting window into the look of one of our top elected officials.

Sheriffs are unique law-enforcement officials. They are county employees, but are outside the chain of command of county government. And they are in the state’s constitution, with a power that is derived in part from common law—remember Robin Hood and Nottingham Forest? But they’re not above the law or above scrutiny. It’s what we told Ron Barker way back when, and what we told Preston Oldham before that.

Two things come to mind. First, Schatzman gave up a lot of money for having a beer at a Marines get-together. Second, is a punishment that nobody knows about really a punishment? Sort of, but not exactly.

Is it news? You bet. Would it have made a difference in the outcome of this fall’s election against Bobby Blakely Jr.? Nope. Is it something voters ought to have known about before they voted? Yep.