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WRCO (100.9 FM) in Richland Center will be replaying part of a program on the first rock and roll band in southern Wisconsin Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.
Southern Wisconsin’s first rock and roll band, as you know, is …
… first known as Vilas Craig and the Vicounts, then as the Kollege Kings, part of the richer-than-you-might-believe tapestry of Wisconsin-based rock music.
(The piano player has my body type but looks more like my brother. I look more like my mother’s side of the family.)
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Just before kickoff of Saturday’s Big Ten football championship came the sad news of the death of college basketball coach Rick Majerus.
Anyone who ever met Majerus has a story about Majerus, who successfully coached four college teams, beginning with Marquette.
Let’s start with Bob Wolfley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, published where Majerus attended Marquette and first coached:
Majerus, who died Saturday in Los Angeles at the age of 64, belongs in there with guys like Abe Lemons or Al McGuire. Eccentrics. Basketball heads who had something more to offer, something other than an expertise about basketball.
They had a sense of humor, the gift of self-deprecation, which is not part of the job description for high level Division I college basketball coaches these days.
You tended to think about Majerus as a kind of Friar Tuck character – exuberant and dangerous in battle. He would entertain you while he was figuring out a way to knock you off the bridge and into the water below.
He never said anything about being Friar Tuck. He preferred thinking of himself as Uncle Fester in the “Addams Family.”
But, according to some accounts, he could be demanding to the point of being hard-hearted. And he was cavalier about his health that was entertaining on one level, but disconcerting and darker on another. Heart bypasses in the high single digits.
Using your poor eating habits for 40 years as comedy has its limits, but Majerus never stopped with the jokes.
“I’m in Hawaii all this month and Santa Barbara all of July and August,” he said to reporters in May 2004. “That’s a pretty good schedule. My biggest concern is people keep pushing me back into the water. I don’t mean the coaching water. I mean when I lay out on the beach, they think I’m a whale and give me a shove back in.”
Majerus was one of college basketball’s most reliable candidates for a job he did not occupy. He was college basketball’s favorite candidate.
Former Milwaukee Journal sports editor Bill Dwyre:
The man with the huge heart and similar body shape, the man who knew more about basketball than 99.6% of the human race and coached it every day of his adult life as if it were the Gospel, left us Saturday afternoon. The heart that was so gigantic, that gave so much of itself, in and out of the sport, could carry the load no more.
He had been at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles for months. The lining of his heart was too thick, had carried the burden of well over 300 pounds for all too long. He awaited a new heart, but never got healthy enough to stay long on the active recipient list.
It was a quiet ending. He had a world of friends, including this typist who knew him from childhood days in Sheboygan, Wis., and newspaper days in Milwaukee. But few were allowed to see him in his final months. He was too proud. …
The weight was his scourge. When Majerus was an assistant at for Al McGuire at Marquette, including on McGuire’s 1977 national title team, McGuire was often merciless about the weight. It was a labor of love and futility. One day, McGuire took one look at what Majerus called progress and labeled it, “A deck chair off the Titanic.”
Majerus loved hosting friends at dinner. He would often start by ordering a dozen entrees. If you liked something, he’d order three more.
He single-handedly kept pizza stores in business. His life mantra was, “Never eat anything green.” …
He made his big splash at Utah, where he coached the likes of Keith Van Horn and Andre Miller and got to the 1998 Final Four.
On game day, he invited a friend to the pregame walk-through. When it ended, he called his players together and invited the friend to listen. Utah was about to play lightning-quick North Carolina in the semifinals. Utah consisted of huge, slow guys and Miller, soon to be a superb pro guard. Majerus told his team the strategy was to rebound, make an outlet pass and go, because “we are quicker than they are.” He said that once they wore down North Carolina, coach Bill Guthridge would have to call a timeout, go to a zone and then they had them.
The big, tall, slow Runnin’ Utes looked at him as if he had finally lost his mind.
That night, Utah got the ball off the boards and ran. Soon, Guthridge called timeout and went to a zone. Majerus had been right. He just hadn’t been specific. What he meant was that Miller, who took most of the outlet passes and dashed to the basket, was quicker than North Carolina.
The next night, Utah stopped running with a lead and about seven minutes left in the game and lost to Kentucky. Most of Majerus’ important NCAA Tournament losses came at the hands of Kentucky.
“They ought to just bury me at the finish line of the Kentucky Derby,” he said after one particularly galling loss, “and let those horses just keep trampling me.”
Retired Journal Sentinel sportswriter Dale Hofmann starts with this photo:
There’s Al McGuire hunched over, near tears, looking like the other coach should be looking, and there’s Hank Raymonds with his left arm draped around Rick Majerus’ neck, a rolled up program in his hand. And then there’s Majerus in a coat and tie and those pants.
If the picture of the Marquette University coaching staff celebrating the last minute of its national championship season isn’t the best college basketball bench shot ever to run in a newspaper, it’s clearly in the top 10 and a lock as the runaway leader in Wisconsin. Dominating it is the No. 2 assistant on a three-man staff.
In extremely plaid pants.
The last of the three men died over the weekend, and with him went an appreciable swatch of the local social fabric. The fabric was polyester in 1977, and even then Majerus was stretching it to its limit, a warning from the menace that would kill him 35 years later. …
The literature is rich with stories of Majerus’ relationships with his players, more good than bad, but plenty of both. There were the four-hour practices balanced by the all-night session with the kid who’d just lost his father. You read lots of adjectives ranging from “demanding” and “earthy” to “compassionate” and “insightful,” but “complacent” never enters the discussion.
Majerus was simply passionate about his trade, and few people ever understood it or taught it better or loved it more. By all accounts, it cost him his one brief marriage. …
Ah yes, the food. As the tributes flooded in, it seemed like every coach, commentator and media member in America shared at least one meal with Majerus. It makes you wonder if he did all his coaching from a booth in the nearest pizza parlor. But that’s going to happen when a high-profile figure in any area of endeavor tops out near 370 pounds.
There’s another picture in the Majerus photo gallery of Ric Cobb, a one-time Marquette assistant who later coached at UW-Milwaukee, restraining Majerus as he came roaring off the bench to dispute an official’s call. I remember that because Cobb told me later that he’d never do it again. Majerus, he said, was so strong he almost broke an arm trying to hold him back.
Like everybody else, I had my own restaurant experience with him. It was breakfast at the Pfister, and as I recall, he ordered dry toast or something like it that wouldn’t satisfy a sparrow. He was on one of his many diets at the time, and even when Majerus couldn’t eat food, he talked about it.
A dedicated swimmer, he explained that it was his exercise of choice because fat people were more buoyant than skinny people. He also claimed that whenever he entered a pool everybody else left because there was never any water left when he jumped in. No one ever accused Rick Majerus of not having a sense of humor. Unfortunately, it was gallows humor sometimes.
After Marquette, the Bucks (as an assistant to another character, Don Nelson) and Ball State, Majerus went to Utah, where he coached the Utes to the NCAA championship game in 1998.
The Salt Lake Tribune’s Gordon Monson:
Rick Majerus was described once as … an interesting bunch of guys.
It was my description and I stand by it because that’s exactly what he was. In the middle of his time running Utah basketball, I joked with him that he was a man of many chins and many faces, and he guffawed about that. It was one of the few times we shared a laugh together. Often, we were at one another’s throat over one thing or another.
But, good lord, the man could coach. And he will be remembered for that.
He didn’t always use attractive language or imagery on the court with his players, and sometimes he was downright crude and verbally abusive, but his basketball methodology was a thing of beauty. If you needed a coach to get you a win, or get you 25 wins, his name would be near the top of anybody’s list. …
One thing about Majerus, when he grabbed a hold of any discussion topic he deemed worthy, you had best get comfortable. I talked with him for seven hours, all on the phone, that day and night, the last call coming from him at midnight and ending at 2 in the morning. We never came to any agreement, and I wrote my column expressing my point of view.
He phoned me the day the column ran to thank me for my fair treatment of him in our disagreement. It’s something he never did again. …
We had our battles. But Majerus always returned phone calls. If you asked him the simplest of questions, he fired off on a circuitous verbal journey that had about 20 pit stops for subject changes along the way. Our discussions and disagreements were almost always fascinating. I asked him about zone defense and we ended up talking about labor unions. I asked him about transition defense and he waxed on about constitutional law. …
“Rick is tough to read because he’s a lot of different things,” Chris Hill once said. “He’s a guy who is absorbed mentally in a lot of interests, but who gets totally engulfed in coaching basketball. His practices are the most organized in the world, but his office is a mess. The way he prepares a team is very organized, but you look at his car, and he can’t even find his keys. He loves to win, but he takes pleasure from his players succeeding academically.” …
The man was a tyrant and a bully, a genius and a virtuoso.
I never interviewed or covered anybody else like him, like all the guys that were him.
Rest in peace, Rick Majerus. Rest in peace.
One of the great what-ifs came in 2001, when, after leaving Utah, Majerus was briefly a candidate to replace Brad Soderberg at Wisconsin. (Soderberg went to Saint Louis, where Majerus ended up replacing him.) I’m sure Madison-based sportswriters were disappointed when Majerus decided against pursuing the job, even though Bo Ryan, himself a quote machine, ended up with the job.
After Majerus worked a while for ESPN, he became the head coach at Saint Louis.
The St. Louis Post–Dispatch’s Bernie Miklasz:
If you had a problem? Rick to the rescue. If you had a medical issue, he was on the phone with names of doctors and recommendations for treatment. (One time I had to tell him: Coach, I have a head cold. I think I’ll be OK in a couple of days. I don’t need to fly to Los Angeles to see a specialist. But thank you.)
If you didn’t have a father, or a trusted friend to guide you through a troubling stretch of life, the big man filled the void. As a basketball man, he coached “help” defense. As a human being, Majerus was help defense. …
Majerus was there for Keith Van Horn, his brightest star at Utah. The coach received a late-night call in 1993. It was Van Horn’s mother. She had shocking news: Keith’s father was dead. A sudden heart attack took his life. And Van Horn’s mom didn’t know how to tell her son. She asked Coach Majerus to do it.
Majerus, of course, was there. At 2 a.m., he took Van Horn to a diner. They sat down. The coach told the freshman the worst words imaginable: Your father has died. Van Horn broke down in tears. Majerus consoled him. They sat there all night, telling happy stories about their late fathers, eating breakfast, and handling the pain. They cried together. They shared bagels. They hugged. They talked some more.
When Van Horn finally walked into the morning light of Salt Lake City, he was ready to face the tragedy. Van Horn said he entered that diner as a kid, and by the time he left, he’d become a man. Majerus pulled him through.
Majerus never had kids of his own, but he raised plenty of them through basketball. On the court, off the court, whatever was necessary. Whether the player needed calm advice, or an old-school cursing out, Majerus was there. He was always there.
That’s why senior St. Louis University power forward Brian Conklin sobbed in the interview room in March, after the Billikens competed like crazy only to get eliminated by Michigan State in the NCAA Tournament.
It was Conklin’s final game for SLU. The finality of the occasion overwhelmed his emotions. Most of all, Conklin knew he’d never have another chance to play for Majerus, to learn from Majerus. The inevitable change that’s inherent in life’s passages would take Conklin away from the coach he loved. And Conklin cried. Majerus was always there for him. What would Conklin do from now on?
“He’s a great coach,” Conklin said that day. “I couldn’t imagine playing for a better coach, a better person. He doesn’t just teach you about ball, he teaches you about life.” …
I hope Rick Majerus knew how much he was loved. I hope he realized that he’d made a tremendous, positive impact on so many lives. You’re going to have to forgive me for making this personal, which I don’t do often, but I cried on Saturday night, and I don’t even know how I pulled myself together to write this wholly inadequate tribute to Rick.
In a previous column, written in late August, at the time Majerus took his leave of absence, I explained our friendship. And how we tried to help counsel each other as we each trudged through our lifelong conflict with obesity. Majerus knew what I was going through. I knew what he was going through. It was our bond. It was a bond I wish we didn’t have.
When I received word of Rick’s death, I was sitting in the living room of our home. My wife was nearby. I lost it. And I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable, but I want to share what I told her: “I know you probably understand this, but I want to say it anyway. You and anyone else that cares about me owe a lot to Rick Majerus, because he played a major role in my turnaround. He was a factor in my decision to do whatever I had to do to get healthy and lead a better life. Without Rick Majerus, I don’t know if I’d still be here.” …
We know about the basketball stuff, but I’ll always treasure Majerus for his teaching, his lessons. The way he helped the Millers, the Van Horns, the Conklins and even the lowly sportswriters. When we were together, I could feel his immense desire to live, and somehow he transferred that to me, before it was too late.
Majerus was there for me. He was there for anyone who needed him. This sad day doesn’t end our relationship. Rick Majerus will be there for me forever.
Sports Illustrated’s Seth Davis:
If you’re a college basketball reporter of a certain age, you almost certainly have a go-to Rick Majerus story.
Here’s mine.
It was the fall of 1996, barely a year after I got hired by Sports Illustrated. The magazine assigned me to write a scouting report on Utah for our college basketball preview issue. So I flew to Salt Lake City to watch the team practice and interview a few players as well as its charismatic, enigmatic coach. Before I left, I asked my veteran colleague, Alex Wolff, for some advice. “Talk to Majerus about stuff other than basektball,” he said.
Unfortunately, when I got there, Majerus didn’t want to talk at all. It’s not that he was opposed to being quoted — Lord knows, he liked being quoted — but rather because he was in a rush to get to a Utah Jazz game. “You’re only going to use one or two sentences, right?” he said. “So let me just give you one or two sentences.”
I told him as politely as I could that my magazine had paid the expense of flying me across the country to interview him, so I was hoping to deliver more than a couple of sentences. Majerus offered to let me ride with him back to his hotel and interview him while he got ready for the game. First, however, he was concerned that I might be hungry.
“You’re Jewish, right?” he asked.
“Yes, coach.”
“You want a bagel?”
“No thanks, coach.”
So we rode in Majerus’ car back to his hotel. That’s where he lived — the Salt Lake City Marriott. He had his own suite. It wasn’t anything extravagant. He simply liked the convenience. Majerus didn’t want the hassles of renting an apartment or owning a home. At the Marriott, he could come and go as he pleased, order room service, have the place cleaned every day. As I often joked with him over the years, he must have accrued more Marriott Rewards points than any customer in the history of the franchise.
Anyway, Majerus jabbered about his team all during the car ride, the walk through the lobby, the trip up the elevator. I kept my tape recorder running the whole time. He continued to talk as we entered his hotel room. Having just left practice, he was still wearing his sweatsuit. He took of his jacket. He took off his shoes. He took off his shirt. He took off his pants. He took off his socks. He took off his underwear.
And there stood Rick Majerus, all 350 pounds of him, quite literally a man in full. Just the way God made him.
“Gee, I hope I’m not embarrassing you,” he said.
Over the years, Majerus would laugh whenever I reminded him of that first close encounter. He was a man with many quirks and warts, as well as a total lack of self-consciousness. He was also quite smart. I just looked up the scouting report I wrote on the Utes that week, and darned if I didn’t use two sentences from our entire conversation.
If you’re a college basketball reporter of a certain age, you probably also have some eating-with-Rick-Majerus stories. The man was always eating, always too much, often late at night. There was the time when I rode with Majerus and a couple of his buddies back and forth to the Utes’ game at BYU in Provo. (Majerus preferred not to travel with his team. He figured the players could use a break from him.) He told me that I could ride back to Salt Lake City with him as long as the team won. If they lost, he would ride with his assistants, and I would have to find another way back.
They won. He drove me back to Salt Lake and we ended up at a downtown diner at 1:30 a.m. As I reported in my story, Majerus ordered the super stack of pancakes topped with blueberries, bananas and chocolate chips (with extra butter and syrup), two eggs over easy, a toasted English muffin and two orders of bacon. “A lot of people say hunger is the best seasoning,” he told me. “I think winning is.”
Majerus won a lot, and he ate a lot. I remember another occasion when we had dinner in a restaurant with about a dozen people. I don’t remember where it was, but I do recall that Wayne Embry, who at the time was the general manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers, sat between us. I couldn’t get enough of listening to the two of them talk ball. I also remember that when the waitress came over to take our order, Majerus laughed and said, “Just keep bringing us food. I’ll let you know when to stop.” …
When the news broke Saturday night that Majerus had died of heart failure at the age of 64, those of us who have covered him for a long time were sad but hardly surprised. We knew Majerus had been in the hospital since he stepped down two months ago as the coach at St. Louis. This very public man had disappeared from view; even his closest friends had not talked to him. Nobody knew the extent of his health problems, but what little they found out wasn’t good.
Furthermore — and let’s be honest here — we have always known that this was not a man destined to live a long and healthy life. He liked to project himself as a jovial, Falstaffian figure, but it is obvious he was also a sad, depressed, lonely man. He had lots of acquaintances but few close friends. He loved two things: Basketball and food. In the end, those things consumed him, not the other way around.
Majerus was more complicated than all these colorful anecdotes would suggest. He was charming, affable and available for national writers like myself, but the local beat guys couldn’t stand him. You always heard horrible stories about Majerus’ antics in practice, his treatment of people in the basketball office, especially his assistants. He belittled his players so badly that they transferred at an alarming rate. During one time-out huddle, he famously challenged a player’s manhood by grabbing his testicles.
And yet, when his St. Louis team lost to Michigan State in the round of 32 in last season’s NCAA tournament, senior Brian Conklin broke down in tears at the postgame news conference. He wasn’t crying just because his team lost. He was crying because he wouldn’t get to play for Majerus anymore.
It was all a part of the great Rick Majerus dichotomy. Another of my SI colleagues, S.L. Price, put it best at the end of his lengthy 2008 magazine profile of Majerus: “There goes the happy coach, back in his element. There goes the saddest man you ever saw.”
ESPN.com’s Gene Wojciechowski:
They say Rick Majerus died of heart failure. They’re wrong.
The Rick Majerus I knew was all heart. His life, all 64 years of it, was a breadcrumb trail of random acts of kindness. I’m not sure I can recall a conversation with him that didn’t begin or end with, “How can I help?” …
I read the wire story lead on his death, the one that described him as “the jovial college basketball coach who led Utah to the 1998 NCAA final and had only one losing season in 25 years with four schools.”
He wasn’t jovial in practices. Or games. Those were intellectual cage matches for him. Whatever the spread was in those games, Majerus was worth at least three points, probably more.
That year Utah (Utah!) reached the national championship game and actually led Kentucky at halftime, Majerus and the Runnin’ Utes had to beat No. 1 seed Arizona in the West Regional final and then No. 1 overall seed North Carolina in the Final Four semis. I was embedded with Utah as part of an ESPN The Magazine assignment.
Usually after wins, Majerus would hunker down with a postgame pizza and game video of the next opponent. But after the 25-point victory against Arizona and its NBA roster, Majerus could be found in the hotel whirlpool, sipping on an umbrella drink.
That was the same night, as he floated off the court in Anaheim, Calif., he spotted me in the tunnel and said, “Give me a hug, Polish Falcon.”
The Columbia Journalism Review might not like it, but when the 300-pound Majerus cornered you for a hug, well, you were getting a hug.
And it was the same night the coaching staff and players sprayed each other with soft drinks and stood happily in the shower area for an impromptu team photo. The innocence and joy on their faces still makes me grin involuntarily.
Majerus was 10 of the smartest people I’ve ever known. The Jesuits educated him well. He was a coach, but he could have been a councilman. He lived in a hotel during much of his career, but his suites often were filled with books. He’d call at night just to talk about a Maureen Dowd column he had read an hour earlier.
He won games, lots and lots of them, but I swear he cared more about seeing his players get diplomas than victories.
He could charm an entire national press corps. He could alienate an entire local media corps. He could hold court. He could hold grudges.
Majerus didn’t suffer fools. He was brilliant, complex and demanding to a fault. He also was loyal, caring and giving to a fault.
He thought the NCAA was dumber than a chia pet. He despised the hypocrisy of rules that lacked a gram of common sense. So, sure, Majerus would take a doggie bag of leftovers to a foreign player on his roster who was alone and homesick in a dinky off-campus apartment during the Christmas holidays. If it was a violation, Majerus could live with the shame.
I too have a Rick Majerus story because of one of my sports announcing highlights, the 1999 Utah game against “tiny Ripon College.” (Majerus and former Ripon coach Bob Gillespie were friends, and Gillespie once was briefly hired as an assistant for Majerus before he changed his mind and returned to Ripon.)
Why did Utah play Ripon? Because, said Majerus, “I know the guy from Ripon, I’m from Ripon, I used to eat a lot of Ripon good cookies and I hope he brings me some Ripon good cookies. We’re throwing a party for him. We’re going to make a lot of money and he’s going to make what he thinks is a lot of money. It’s a great friendship and that’s why we’re playing the game.”
I interviewed Majerus after his New Year’s Day practice the night before the game. (Practice started right after the 1999 Rose Bowl, the end of which I saw in our hotel room — the University Marriott in Salt Lake City, the same hotel Majerus lived in during his years coaching the Utes — to which I ran up to get my tape recorder. The sequence was: Go in, turn on the TV, find the recorder, watch the game-ending quarterback sack, cheer, and run out the door.)
I asked Majerus seven questions. I got 15 minutes of answers. I had to run half of the pregame interview during halftime, because the answers were just priceless. You could tell right away that whenever Majerus had had enough of coaching, some TV sports operation would welcome him with open arms and a lunch or dinner buffet.
The story goes beyond Majerus, because on the morning of the game, we discovered we had outsmarted ourselves. We made our plane reservations through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, because, we reasoned, O’Hare never closes due to bad weather. The morning of the game, the first thing we heard on TV was the 23 inches of snow hitting Chicago, with plane flights already being diverted several days later. So our first activity the day of the game was to go to the Salt Lake City airport and reschedule our flight from Sunday to the following Wednesday. (Happily, the University Marriott extended our group rate for the next three nights, including their epic daily breakfast buffet. I’ve been a fan of Marriotts ever since then.)
That same blizzard dumped 18 inches of snow in Ripon. The game was not on TV, so the radio station’s news and sports director claimed that that was the highest rated program in the radio station’s history, with a captive audience listening. Ripon scored the game’s first eight points but lost 74–49.
Ripon fans congregated in the hotel’s restaurant after the game. So did Majerus, where he ordered a club sandwich. Which he apparently forgot about, resulting in the mother of one of the players and ourselves eating Majerus’ club sandwich.
We didn’t run into Majerus after that, but we had an extremely pleasant three days after that being “stranded” in Salt Lake (temperature 50 degrees) due to “bad weather.” When we got back to O’Hare, our car was encased in two feet of snow and ice, and the temperature was below zero.
Majerus should get the last word, or words, from this collection:
“Nobody thought I’d be a great coach. I’m the kind of guy you’d expect to be driving an 18-wheeler through town.”
“We’re at the WAC tournament and they want us to show the kids a film on gambling. And we’re staying on top of a casino. I asked them where do they want me to show the tape, at the blackjack table, the craps pit or when the boys are checking out their Keno numbers?”
“I like practice, I love teaching, I love to see a kid get a degree and an education. I enjoy the college campus. I love the theater in our campus. I like the campus life. There’s a travel club on our campus, and I’ll go to those lectures. In an NBA player’s life, how can you make a difference? I mean, you might be able to make a little bit of a difference, but I think I’ve impacted all my players more than any pro coach they’ve ever played for — both from a basketball standpoint, but more importantly, from a lifestyle standpoint. (Keith) Van Horn just asked me to be the godfather for his baby. It was fun to sit through Andre (Miller’s) graduation, to see his mom smile. It was fun to see Hanno (Mottola) come from Europe and realize his dream. It was fun to see Drew Hansen get in Stanford Law School. The other night, one of my players had a really bad family problem and I really did enjoy offering a perspective on it and seeing if I could help him out. A lot of people that are very wealthy throw money at their problems, but it’s fun to help them work through it. I love the fans and the college students. I like the alumni association deal. I like the rah-rah and all that. I like the band rather than that fabricated music. I like the fact that we have students that are cheerleaders that really care, as opposed to a dancing girl team of hired mercenaries.”
“In the late 1990s with Utah, we were in a regional, and coach [Al] McGuire was there and I asked him to talk to my team. He talked to them and then asked for any questions. Someone said to him, “How good was coach as a player?” He said, “Let me explain something to you, ‘We had an Indian mascot named Willie Wampum when coach played. I would have put the mascot before I put coach in the game.”
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The headline is the traditional end of a newspaper story back in the old days when news stories were typewritten on single sheets of letter-sized paper, and then manually typeset back in the press room.
I chose this headline not because it’s the last headline I wrote for the late Marketplace Magazine, but because I am saddened by this news (from Madison.com):
The wife of a longtime Monona and McFarland newspaper publisher died Tuesday — hours before her husband also passed away — after she hit her head in an ambulance that braked abruptly while transporting her husband to a Fitchburg hospice, police said.
Laurel Huibregtse, 85, of Madison died at UW Hospital from injuries she suffered Monday while accompanying her husband to Agrace HospiceCare, said Fitchburg police Lt. Chad Brecklin.
Her husband, Donald Huibregtse, 86, former publisher of the Monona Community Herald and McFarland Community Life, died several hours later at the hospice.
There is great irony, at least to those of us with the black humor of journalists, that instead of reporting the news, Don was the news. (Journalists think in such a warped fashion, you see.)
Don Huibregtse (pronounced “HEW-brets”; it’s Dutch and one of the few names harder to spell than “Prestegard”) was my first journalism employer. I was a college student working at a Mexican restaurant (not named Taco Bell, though similar). I had applied for a part-time sportswriting job there earlier in 1985 and not gotten it. The guy they hired, though, was allergic to photography. (However, he ended up covering the Packers, so journalism worked out fine for him.) For whatever reason, Don called me in August 1985 and offered me a job, giving him two part-time sportswriters for one weekly newspaper. (Except that the second of the two also got to cover Cottage Grove village and town government, back when each was much more rural than now.)
So for nearly three years, I was paid $3.75 per hour to put in 15 to 20 hours a week covering the sports of my alma mater, Madison La Follette, shooting La Follette and Monona Grove sports, covering the Cottage Grove governments, and doing whatever else was required. That eventually expanded into layout, headline-writing, feature-writing, sports column-writing (the Herald was pretty much half sports and half everything else), and even such oddities as covering a senior-citizen fashion show, having just come from UW Marching Band practice and dressed for same.
Don owned the Monona Community Herald (from which he lopped off “Monona” when he started covering the La Follette High School attendance area), McFarland Community Life, and Good News shopper. It was sort of appropriate that the Herald hired me, because I had been in it at least twice before, when I won the 1977 and 1979 Madison city spelling bees. (The reporter who interviewed me both times later purchased a newspaper in northern Wisconsin with her husband.)
This was back in the days when desktop publishing as it’s known today didn’t exist. (While I was at the Herald Don purchased an Apple Macintosh computer. It had a four-inch black-and-white screen.) Stories were typed into Compugraphic machines, which saved the story (unless you accidentally deleted it, which was known to happen) onto a five-inch floppy disk. That disk was taken to another machine, which (to make a long description shorter) printed the story onto sheets of photosensitive paper six inches or so wide. That paper then was cut up and run through a machine that applied hot wax onto the back side (assuming you put it in correctly or didn’t cut it so small that it got caught in the rollers). The story, or headline, or cutline (“caption” for you non-journalist readers), was put onto layout sheets that had photo blue lines, which didn’t print when the newspaper was printed.
Photos were taken with the Canon AE-1 camera I had purchased with high school graduation money, on black-and-white 35-millimeter negative film. Once the film was developed, you would put the film onto a light table and use a lens to choose the shots you wanted to develop. You hoped you had chosen one that was not blurry, or had odd facial expressions on it. In fact, you hoped as you waited for the film to develop that you had any usable prints at all. (Sometimes there weren’t because of photographer error or insufficient light, particularly when shooting sports outdoors at night.) Shots were developed as “halftones,” with little dots allowing the photo to be printed.
Compared with today, the preceding two paragraphs seems like an arduous process. And we haven’t even gotten to the part about learning what questions to ask and how to convert those answers into a story usually starting with the inverted triangle lead (most general information first, more specific stuff later). For a while I taped interviews, but I stopped doing that because I found writing the story took more than twice as long as doing the interview. I think it made me a better writer because I had to learn it the hard way. It certainly made me a better headline writer (which is quite helpful for Twitter) because you had to get the headline to fit mostly through writing, not merely changing kerning or leading or width of the character.
I am absolutely convinced that working at a weekly newspaper is the best way to get into print journalism. (For those who really want to …) You do a lot of different things, because you have to. Journalism students I knew worked at one of the UW student newspapers, the Daily Communist — I mean Cardinal — or the Badger Herald. (I did a bit of writing for the latter.) The difference between working at a weekly and working at a student newspaper is that you are both paid and professionally judged at a weekly.
Through working at the Herald (the second in a streak of newspapers named Herald for which I worked — after the Badger Herald and Community Herald, the Grant County Herald Independent and the Tri-County Press, formerly the Cuba City News–Herald) I learned about the joys of getting paid twice for the same work. Toward the end of my UW days I took a public affairs reporting class with Ray Anderson, a reporter for the New York Times. That class required me to do several government stories, including covering meetings, and a profile piece. Pretty much all the stories I was required to write became Herald stories, or vice versa — coverage of the aforementioned village and town board, a three-part story about a proposed landfill expansion, a feature about the local state senator. I also was assigned to cover a Dane County Board meeting for a group of Dane County weeklies, for which I got a nice additional check.
I was given a lot of rope at the Herald, or got a lot of opportunities to learn from my mistakes from the Herald and Life editors, the reporter who worked for both, and the other adults at work. I was once castigated by a candidate for a town board because, he claimed, I had taken out of context something he said. (Even though I believe I quoted him accurately.) I never heard from him again, because he lost the election. I also learned that in at least one case, a member of the American Legion did not appreciate being called a member of the VFW. A baseball coach (a former teacher of mine) did not appreciate my talking to his team during a game they lost 19–0. (Given the conditions of 40 degrees, wind and rain, I didn’t appreciate being there either.) I had to not only talk to people who claimed mistakes in things I had written, I had to write the corrections. And then there was the reader who did not appreciate my use of the term “old fart” to describe myself marching in a La Follette Homecoming football game.
Don was, surprisingly to me, hands-off about the editorial side of the papers. I didn’t particularly understand the publisher role vs. the editor role, but he did occasionally say he liked something, or didn’t like something, but always after it appeared in the paper. He was, for lack of a better term, Dutch gruff. Early on he got on me for wearing cutoff shorts to work. He also woke me up one morning when I had put names in a cutline for a photo that weren’t in any order. That taught me the importance of attention to detail without getting fired for it.
Even though I had gotten bylines in other publications (The Lance, the La Follette student newspaper, and the aforementioned Badger Herald), it was still a thrill to see “by Steve Prestegard” in newsprint, accompanied by actual paychecks. And then, as now, I’d be covering a baseball game in glorious spring or summer weather, or covering a fantastic finish in a basketball game, or talking to someone doing something really interesting, or look at the ideal combination of story, photos and headlines on a page as the result of my work, and think to myself, I’m getting paid to do this.
I said before that the Community Herald was half sports and half everything else. We indeed covered the hell out of La Follette and Monona Grove sports, along with summer baseball and swimming, and whatever else came our way. (The funniest story we elected to not cover was a 15-year-old singer, accompanied by her mother, on what was being called the Shopping Mall Tour. You may have heard of her: Tiffany.) We wrote a sports column, one time suggesting that one of Madison’s daily newspapers was covering Monona Grove boys basketball well because the son of the editor was MG’s point guard. The editor was not amused. (And in retrospect we weren’t clear enough that we were joking and not complaining. As people who use social media discover, the meaning of something in print doesn’t necessarily get read as you intend.) My great-aunt was a cooking columnist for the Little Falls, Minn., newspaper, and she exchanged recipes with our typesetter/cooking columnist.
I commented earlier this week that it was Don’s fault that I’m still doing this, because he didn’t fire me. In fact, sometime after I started, my parents and I ran into the Huibregtses at the late Burke Station restaurant, where he told everyone at the table what a great job I was doing for the Herald. When I got the offer to go to the Herald Independent, he talked to the editor about promoting me to full-time, but was informed he wasn’t likely to agree to pay me what I was getting paid to head west. (Don was frugal. I didn’t understand that until I owned a newspaper myself.) I ran into him at a Wisconsin Newspaper Association convention a few years later to pick up the Tri-County Press’ Most Improved Newspaper award, and he was clearly glad to see me in the editor/publisher world. I hope he gets a nice tribute at this year’s WNA convention.
All the preceding led me to my first full-time journalism job, which led me out of the world of suburban journalism into the world of rural journalism. I wouldn’t say I went to Lancaster by any means a finished product, but my Community Herald experience did allow me to hit the ground running at the Herald Independent, particularly in headline-writing. The places I’ve worked from the Community Herald onward have developed my style as a writer, whatever that is, as well as the stylebook between my ears that covers how whatever is written in a publication that has my name in it should and should not appear.
I had forgotten that Don had sold the newspapers the same year I left, 1988. (The Community Herald apparently was combined with another newspaper to form, ironically enough, the Herald Independent.) Another Dane County weekly owner bought him out. A year or so later, I interviewed for the Herald editor position, but was unenthused about taking a pay cut to move up from reporter to editor. A different newspaper group now owns the Herald Independent.
There are two reasons why weekly newspapers, and increasingly daily newspapers, are owned in groups. The first is that being in business is increasingly expensive and complicated, and the smaller you are, the worse it is. Grant County used to have seven weekly newspapers with six different owners. Grant County now has six weekly newspapers owned by the same company. (Fortunately, that company believes in weekly nameplates; other owners would have combined them into one or two or three newspapers.) Group ownership allows office functions like billing and circulation to be combined, allowing resources to be put into editorial; it also allows group ad purchases.
The other reason is that weekly newspapers are decreasingly family operations. Ralph Goldsmith owned the Boscobel Dial for 36 years. His children worked at the Dial at one point or another, but none of them apparently wanted to own the newspaper. Rex Goldthorpe owned the Tri-County Press for 27 years, after he purchased it from the estate of his father, who owned it for 64 years. Rex’s kids also worked at the Tri-County Press, but didn’t want to buy it either. Richard Brockman owned The Platteville Journal for 31 years, eight fewer than his father owned the newspaper. There was no next generation there. At least one of Don and Laurel’s children worked at the Herald/Life/Good News.
I suspect children of newspaper owners like Ralph and Rex saw how hard their parents worked — nights, weekends, late nights, holidays, etc. — and noticed as well how often their parents were criticized for not doing enough, or not covering something well enough, or not covering something at all because they couldn’t be in more than one place at a time, and decided there was no way in hell they wanted to do that for their working lives. (On the other hand, one of Ralph’s sons became a graphic design professor.) Being a small-town newspaper editor is a job you never really stop doing as long as you have the job — that is, if you’re doing the job the right way. Your workplace is wherever you are within your newspaper’s circulation area, whenever you’re there, daytime, nighttime, weekdays or weekends or holidays.
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This requires some bombastic music first:
From Bloomberg:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWSA) is taking steps to start a national U.S. sports network on cable television aimed at challenging Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s ESPN, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
News Corp. is assembling the required rights from pay-TV carriers and sports organizations, said the people, who requested anonymity because talks are private. While a final decision to move forward hasn’t been made, the company is considering converting its Fuel action-sports network to the new channel, two of the people said.
With a national network, Fox would join Comcast Corp. (CMCSA)’s NBC Sports Network and CBS Corp. (CBS)’s CBS Sports Network in taking on the dominant ESPN. News Corp. last year secured rights to the Pac-12 Conference and Big-12 Conference games and owns 20 regional sports networks. The company in October won TV rights to soccer’s World Cup in 2018 and 2022. …
Fuel, a 24-hour action-sports network that carries mixed- martial arts fights, is available in 36 million U.S. homes, according to Fox.
In addition to Fox Sports Net regional channels and Fuel, News Corp. owns motor-sport network Speed, available in 78 million homes, the Fox Soccer Channel, the Big Ten Network, a partnership with the college sports conference, and Fox College Sports, consisting of Pacific, Central and Atlantic regional networks. News Corp. also shows games on broadcast television through Fox Sports.
Big Journalism adds:
News Corp’s involvement in the sports entertainment field would be a massive step forward for competition in the marketplace. They already own the rights to broadcast Dodger games in Los Angeles. For too long, ESPN has held a full monopoly – and it has had some political consequences, with ESPN routinely taking the liberal line on everything from ownership/union disputes to touting of President Obama.
That paragraph contains one arguable point. The worst reason for Fox to try to take on ESPN is political. Rupert Murdoch is a right-winger, but he does things to make money, not merely to score political points or exert influence. Moreover, in our overpoliticized world it is nice to find an area where politics can be avoided. I suspect no ESPN viewer watches for the purpose of finding out ESPN’s political take on the sports subject du jour.
It’s not as if there aren’t already a lot of sports choices out there beyond ESPN and Fox. The former CBS College Sports is now the CBS Sports Network. If the National Hockey League still existed, you could watch hockey on NBC Sports, formerly Versus, formerly the Outdoor Life Network. The regional Fox Sports channels are getting competition as well from Comcast (partly owned by NBC Universal) in 11 markets, including Chicago. Each of the major pro team sports has its own cable channel too.
But betting against Murdoch’s ability to take on the ESPN empire would be unwise. In addition to all the Fox Sports iterations, News Corp. started Sky Sports, which became Great Britain’s number one sports channel by purchasing the rights to sports leagues away from the BBC. Fox has rights to the NFL, college football and Major League Baseball, and the Fox Sports affiliates broadcast baseball and college and pro basketball. Fox owns 49 percent of the Big Ten Network too. Finding programming will be the least of Fox’s concerns, on TV or radio, given that Fox Sports Radio already exists. (And if you’re looking for an announcer, Rupert — may I call you Rupert? …)
Fox Sports has been a TV sports innovator, sometimes in good ways (continuous score and time, the first-down line), sometimes not (the glowing hockey puck and assigning Terry Bradshaw and Jimmy Johnson to announce an NFL game with no play-by-play announcer). I always find amusing watching ESPN Classic or the Big Ten Network carry pre-’90s games in which the score is rarely on the screen. CBS, NBC and, yes, ESPN had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era of TV sports thanks to Fox, which correctly figured out that putting the score on the screen didn’t invite people to merely channel-surf.
Another reason to root for Fox comes in a Bloomberg comment:
ESPN is unwatchable these days, as every studio show has some loudmouth pundit like Skip Bayless, Jon Barry, Colin Cowherd, Steven A Smith, etc. I could go on and on! I grew up with ESPN in the 80’s/90’s and somewhere in the last 10-15 years that channel seems to be run by a bunch of College Kids who are leaving the frat house after a night of heavy drinking. They have to hype EVERY story, (Lin-sanity is just one example) and shove it in your face like there is no tomorrow, instead of just reporting the story and having a civil debate on it. The only reason they can get away with it is they have a monopoly, as the casual sports just goes to ESPN simply because there is no place else to go. With the advent of NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB Network along with Regional Sports Networks, I left ESPN a long time ago, but those networks still cater to the diehard sports fan. Hopefully FOX and NBC Sports can be a valid atlternative the same way FOX and MSNBC are to CNN these days. More competition is always better for the consumer!
The print compliment to this is ESPN The Magazine, which for design reasons is unreadable for those beyond eighth-grade reading skills. ESPN The Magazine sees itself as a competitor to Sports Illustrated (SI’s Swimsuit Issue, meet ESPN’s Body Issue). But ESPN The Magazine will find out what Sport magazine and Inside Sports found out — covering sports on a monthly basis is practically impossible. (Doing a Super Bowl preview a month out is practically impossible, and covering a Super Bowl a month later is old news.)
For a variety of reasons, I hope Fox Sports’ national venture succeeds. I would like to see sports covered as sports, not as sophomoric attitude and less-than-informed opinion, which is what ESPN has become when it ventures outside covering games.
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First: I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program today doing the 8 a.m. Week in Review segment. (My prerecorded self will also be on at 9 p.m.)
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
That is not really media news. This is, from Madison.com:
A shakeup at WTDY radio, 1670 AM and 106.7 FM, has left several broadcasters out of work, including longtime Madison radio personality John “Sly” Sylvester.
“Message to everybody: I just want to inform you that today was my last day of employment at WTDY,” Sylvester posted on his Facebook page Wednesday. “After 15 years, I was told that my services were no longer needed. I would like to thank everybody that’s supported my program. It’s been a pleasure to share this wonderful experience with you.” …
Amy Barrilleaux, WTDY news director, said in a tweet that “WTDY is no longer news talk. That’s all I know.” Barrilleaux tweeted that she is among those who lost their jobs Wednesday.
You may recall (or you may not; that’s what archives are for) that I made a couple of guest appearances on Sly’s show as the non-liberal ex-Madisonian, or something like that. That all started with my daring to criticize my hometown, reaction to which took an entire hour of his show and led to my first appearance.
Much of the online reaction to Sly’s firing was outrage. Those people may not grasp the fact that radio is a business like any other; it’s about making money, and if WTDY’s format didn’t make enough money for its owners, management feels the need to make a change. Sly was useful to WTDY as long as he was bringing in listeners and thus advertising revenue. Those complaining about Sly’s firing and promising never to listen to WTDY — well, I’m guessing WTDY wasn’t counting on them as future listeners anyway.
James Wigderson visually demonstrates why WTDY’s owner felt compelled to make the format change:
Other reaction was in the category of schadenfreude, or the related observation that votes have consequences. (See? I told you unemployment would increase if you voted for Obama!) Sly arguably brought on that schadenfreude upon himself for some of his more hateful rants over the years. Having been unemployed myself, however, I don’t share in celebrating someone else’s unemployment. (Except for politicians.) Unemployment sucks. The fact that Sly was frequently classless on the air doesn’t mean his detractors need to be. (The funniest comment, referring to Sly’s previous radio gig: “Just like a vinyl from hell, Sly will never die.”)
David Blaska chronicled Sly’s wanderings over the line of taste, which include this. The thing is, though, WTDY didn’t fire Sly because of what Sly called Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch or WIBA radio’s Vicki McKenna. WTDY fired everybody, presumably on the way to a format change. (Including WTDY’s “news” operations, which struck me as more liberal advocacy than news.)
Two lessons come to mind. First: If someone offers you a job in radio, remember what happened yesterday. Sly was on WTDY for 15 years, a liberal talk show host in liberal Madison. I don’t know if he got up Wednesday knowing that was going to be his last day of employment, but he knew after his show. It seems classless (because it is) to fire somebody the day before Thanksgiving, but what do you suppose would have happened if Sly had been told that his last day was going to be some unspecified future date? Given his reputation, it could have lost WTDY its license.
Journalism seems to be getting to the point where it needs to be the second, not first, source of income in a family, not merely because of the traditionally low pay, but because of the less-than-low job security. Anyone who’s worked in radio beyond the smallest markets can tell stories that either happened to themselves or to others of someone who lost their radio job because the owners or managers decided on a format change, or because they were viewed by management as too old.
The other lesson is the difference between Sly and such radio talkers as Rush Limbaugh, Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes. (Besides ideology, obviously.) If Air America’s crash and burn didn’t prove it, this should: Liberal talk radio largely doesn’t make money. If a radio station selling left-wing views doesn’t work in the People’s Republic of Madison, well, markets speak, whether or not you like what they have to say.
There is still a progressive talk station in Madison, WXXM (whose ratings, you’ll note in the graphic, are better than WTDY’s were), but it is largely not local. It is also owned by the company that purchased Sly’s former employer, so I’m guessing Sly is persona non grata there, although one thing I’ve learned from observing radio over the years is that no one is ever truly, finally fired in radio.
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Forty-nine years ago at 12:30 p.m., John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy were riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas.
At the same time, those watching a CBS-affiliate TV station (including probably my mother and grandmother) were watching this:
About seven minutes later, listeners to ABC radio stations heard this:
About three minutes after that, the aforementioned CBS viewers saw this:
Those listening to the biggest Top 40 station in Dallas had their listening to the Chiffons interrupted:
Those watching whatever their NBC-TV station was carrying around 12:45 heard this …
… while those watching WFAA-TV in Dallas at the same time saw this:
Those watching ABC-TV’s rerun of “Father Knows Best” saw this:
From then on, for the first time in history, all three TV networks presented wall-to-wall (or as close as possible; most TV stations went off the air after midnight) coverage of breaking news:
I have great interest in JFK’s assassination and coverage thereof for a couple of reasons. I went to John F. Kennedy School in Madison, so that may be part of it, in addition to my being a media geek.
Coverage of Kennedy’s assassination came a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which would have qualified for breaking news had the technology existed to bring live bulletins beyond someone sitting in front of a camera or microphone reading a script.
What is interesting from viewing the coverage is the quality of most of the TV coverage for an unprecedented (for TV) event. It was far from perfect (the ABC-TV coverage is particularly difficult to watch early on), but live remote reports were rare even when they could be set up in advance, let alone when they needed to be set up on the spur of the moment. NBC had its own problems getting a telephone report from Robert MacNeil (later of PBS’ MacNeil–Lehrer Report).
In comparison, the local radio coverage left something to be desired. Perhaps it’s because coverage standards have changed, but it blows my mind (pun not intended) that radio stations would report that the president had been shot in their own city, and then go back to their usual programming (music and, in one case, a Bible program). One reason is that radio news reporters were strewn all over the area to cover Kennedy’s several appearances in Fort Worth and Dallas. One station went between its own coverage and CBS radio coverage, while another went between its own coverage and NBC radio coverage, which also incorporated NBC TV coverage.
TV initially did the same thing. Imagine today watching, say, reports that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, and then being asked to stay tuned for later bulletins. In the nearly five decades since today, viewers expect wall-to-wall coverage, whether or not actual news is broadcast or repeated endlessly intertwined with less-than-factually-based observation and speculation.
There were mistakes, because there are always mistakes in such coverage. Lyndon Johnson was reported to also have been shot and to have had a heart attack. (Imagine the panic that briefly created.) A Secret Service agent was reported to have died. (Oswald killed a Dallas police officer after shooting Kennedy.)
Since there was no such thing as a minicam and satellites weren’t in much use yet, there is no tape of the actual announcement from White House assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff:
Nearly everything (except for CBS-TV’s NFL games on Sunday, since, unlike the American Football League, the NFL did not cancel games Nov. 24, a decision NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle later regretted) was knocked off the air for the next four days. That included NBC’s “Bob Hope Chrysler Theatre” on Friday, CBS’ Jackie Gleason and “Gunsmoke” Saturday, and CBS’ Ed Sullivan and NBC’s “Bonanza” on Sunday.
One is struck on watching the coverage how Kennedy’s assassination emotionally affected those covering it in a way I doubt would be repeated in today’s cynical age:
From nearly 50 years later, some reporters and commentators sound as if they were in the tank for Kennedy — or, more accurate, Kennedy the image:
A rather clear-eyed, even cold commentary came from NBC’s Edwin Newman, a UW grad:
Newman’s colleague, Chet Huntley, gave a commentary that might have to be repeated in our currently overheated political atmosphere:
Had I been a columnist or commentator (who might have actually voted for Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon) in late November 1963, I might have peered through my glasses or newfangled contact lenses, puffed on my pipe, and typed out something like this:
On Monday, Americans will get to witness on television something most have never seen before, except possibly in a theater newsreel — a state funeral. This country’s last state funeral took place in 1945 upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt.
It was noted at the time of President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 that this country had an unprecedented number of living former presidents — Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy’s predecessor; Harry Truman, Eisenhower’s predecessor; and Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt’s predecessor. It is one of many cruel ironies of this weekend that all three have outlived our youngest elected president.
Kennedy was not our youngest president; that was Theodore Roosevelt, who became president upon the assassination of William McKinley, the last president to have been assassinated before Friday. However, our youngest elected president is also the youngest to have died in office.
Those men who fought in and survived World War II will note the additional irony of one of their own, who had his PT boat cut in two and sunk by a Japanese destroyer 20 years ago, surviving that only to die of violence back in this country.
When you reach the age of President Kennedy, you start to notice when people of your own age show up in the obituary columns. Usually, their deaths are because of heart attacks or car accidents or cancer. President Kennedy projected youth, energy and vitality, thanks in large part to his family. Whether or not you voted for him, most men of President Kennedy’s age or with a young family identified with him much more than with any other president of our memory. And now, Mrs. Kennedy will have to raise their two young children by herself, a widow thanks to, according to the wire reports, a former Marine who left this country for the Soviet Union.
President Kennedy knew much tragedy in his short life. Two of his men on PT 109 were killed in the collision with the Japanese destroyer. His older brother, Joe, died during World War II. One sister, Kathleen, died in a plane crash. Another sister, Rosemary, is retarded and in a nursing home. Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy had a stillborn daughter and another son, Patrick, die shortly after birth earlier this year. The president’s father suffered a massive stroke earlier this year. This latest Kennedy family tragedy is now the nation’s tragedy as well.
Those readers who were around in the 1940s remember where they were when news was reported about the Pearl Harbor attack and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Now, this generation has its own where-were-you-when moment. This moment, though, reflects poorly on the United States of America.
I tried to write that what-if column from the viewpoint of 1963. (Hence the term “retarded” to describe Rosemary Kennedy, who had a low IQ and was the victim of a lobotomy ordered by her father.) Americans then and now like to think of ourselves as idealists. A lot of Americans got into government because of Kennedy and what he seemed to represent. Even though Kennedy defeated a presidential candidate just four years older, Kennedy represented to most Americans youth and vigor. (We know now from his medical record that that was an inaccurate representation, as was a great deal of his life story.) He also represented nearly unlimited possibility, such as his embracing a flight to the Moon.
Those of my generation have never experienced an assassination of a president, though an attempt was made on Ronald Reagan’s life. So it’s hard to say how we’d react today to a similar event. Much of the reaction would be based on our political worldview, which is the wrong motivation. We are much more cynical today for good reason, and we see politics as a zero-sum game — one side wins, which means the other loses.
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What do these things have in common?
The first is from “Hawk,” a 1966–67 ABC-TV series about a New York City police detective, played by Burt Reynolds. “Hawk” was replayed in the summer of 1976 on NBC, in order to capitalize on Reynolds’ popularity, and because, well, NBC had nothing better to show at the time.
The second is from “NYPD,” a 1967–69 ABC series about a group of New York City police detectives. I remember seeing “Hawk” on NBC, and years later in syndication. I have never seen “NYPD,” one of TV’s last half-hour dramas, anywhere except YouTube.
From those two series lies a tale from the Classic TV History blog about how Hollywood operated in the 1960s. Long story short: “Hawk” lasted only one season for various reasons, even though …
Hawk was a cop show that debuted on ABC on September 8, 1966. It had a simple premise. John Hawk (Burt Reynolds) was a tough young plainclothes detective who caught killers, thieves, and other felons. There were two gimmicks. One, Hawk was a full-blooded Native American. Two, he worked the night shift. Hawk never saw daylight, and neither did the viewer.
Let’s look again at the credits of the Hawk pilot, which was titled “Do Not Spindle or Mutilate.” Hubbell Robinson was one of television’s most respected independent producers, a former CBS executive whose championing of Playhouse 90 (which he created) and other quality television had damned him as, perhaps, too cerebral for the mainstream. The writer was Allan Sloane, a recent Emmy nominee for an episode of Breaking Point. Sam Wanamaker, who had spent his years on the blacklist as a distinguished Shakespearean actor in England, directed. Kenyon Hopkins, composer of East Side / West Side’s brilliant, Emmy-nominated jazz score, wrote the music, and The Monkees impresario Don Kirshner is in there as a “music consultant,” whatever that means. Oh, and the guest villain, the guy who bundles up a bomb in a brown paper wrapper before the opening titles? Gene Hackman.
And what about that missing name? He had some Emmys on his shelf, too. The producer of “Do Not Spindle or Mutilate,” the one who’s not mentioned in any reference books or internet sites, was Bob Markell, fresh off a stint producing all four seasons of The Defenders. The Defenders won multiple Emmy Awards every year it was on the air, including the statue for Best Drama (which Markell took home) during the first two seasons. Hawk was only Markell’s second job following The Defenders. So why was his name expunged?
“There are a lot of well-kept secrets about me,” said Markell in an interview last month.
The story is interesting, particularly because of what replaced “Hawk”:
Markell’s highlight reel sold the stripped-down N.Y.P.D. pilot to the network. Superficially, the new show was similar to Hawk. Both spilled out into the streets of Manhattan, updating the grimy, teeming urban imagery of Naked City and East Side / West Side with a burst of color. But Hawk courted a film noir sensibility – John Hawk was the lone wolf, hunting at night – and N.Y.P.D. was about the institution, the process. It followed three detectives of varying seniority as they plowed methodically through the drudgery of police work: legwork, surveillance, interrogation. …
Hawk ran on Thursdays at 10 PM, N.Y.P.D. on Tuesdays at 9:30. But it seems likely that ABC had only one “slot” for a stylish Manhattan police drama on its schedule, and that N.Y.P.D.’s pickup had been contingent upon Hawk’s cancellation. And the network probably told Markell as much.
What do all these series have in common? For one thing, they look and sound (as in their soundtracks) great from the beginning:
They all had a gritty view of New York before New York’s nadir in the 1970s and 1980s. (Did art imitate life, or did art precede life?) They were all in the Television Code days, before words you couldn’t then but can now say on TV, before things (and body parts) you couldn’t show then but can now show on TV.
It’s not as if we can go back, but one wonders why TV producers can’t combine the best of both worlds today.
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Today is election day. In less than a day, to paraphrase Gerald Ford, our long national nightmare will be over.
Election Day is a long, long day for three groups — candidates and their supporters, poll workers and municipal and county clerk offices, and the media.
(Before I resume: Kudos to Ted Ehlen for finding these YouTube clips.)
The first election radio coverage took place in 1920. The first election TV coverage took place in 1948:
My parents may have watched the 1960 results, but maybe they were distracted by their wedding two months from then:
The first presidential election I was alive for was 1968, but given that I was 3 and my parents strictly enforced bedtimes, I’m guessing I didn’t watch:
The first presidential election I remember was 1972. The rumor around my elementary school on the far East Side of Madison was that George McGovern was going to make us go to school on Saturdays. At least in some parts of the People’s Republic of Madison, Richard Nixon was the one that election.
The presidential election I first paid real attention to, though, was 1980. I was getting ready to stay up late, possibly all night, for the too-close-to-call election. And then, at 7:15 p.m., NBC-TV called the presidential election for Ronald Reagan. (While Reagan was taking a shower, by the way.)
Calls that early don’t happen anymore because the networks now are loath to call an election before the polls close on the West Coast, lest a particular projection result in people not bothering to vote. That famously occurred in 2000, when CBS called Florida for Al Gore while people were still voting in the Panhandle, which is one time zone behind the rest of the state. (More about that election in a few paragraphs.)
The only election I’ve been involved in as a participant, sort of, was 1984, when I worked on the successful campaign of a state representative trying to advance to the state Senate. (You’ll never guess who the candidate was.) I may have been the only person at the election party that night who was totally satisfied with the results, because my choices for state Senate and Assembly and president (the latter of whom was from a different party from the legislative candidates) all won.
That was while I was in college. College is a great time to be involved in politics because, even though you think otherwise, you don’t have much invested in the outcome. When you become an adult and have things like homes, retirement savings, etc., suddenly watching becomes less fun because you have more (literally) invested in the outcome.
The first election I ever worked in the media was 1988, when I was calling in results to the Associated Press while compiling results from the Grant County Courthouse. That night I devised the Last Precinct Game, trying to figure out which precinct would be the final precinct to report its results. The chances of being the Last Precinct increase by distance, and nearly every election afterward I called some town clerk in the middle of the night to get their election results.
My least favorite election night was 1992. Not because of the results, but because of the fact that very, very early Election Day was the day my wife and I returned from our honeymoon to Mexico. When we left, it was 85 and partly cloudy; when we arrived at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, it was 37 and sleeting. At 3:30 the morning after, I was sitting in the old Tri-County Press office in Cuba City barely able to type and trying to get the newspaper done.
My highlight from 1996’s election night was going to two parties for Congressional candidates. The first party was for the winning candidate; the second was for the losing candidate, who I knew and for whom I had voted. Winning-candidate parties are more fun (particularly if the winner’s dog is allowed to drink champagne at the party).
The most memorable election night, which was much longer than one night, took place four years later. The month-long election night began when I made an appearance on a radio station that had to end before midnight because my wife was on call with the local ambulance starting at midnight. Even though journalism is the opposite of math, we were able to figure out that the one state that would decide the election was Florida, or, as NBC’s Tim Russert wrote on his famous whiteboard, “FLORIDA FLORIDA FLORIDA.”
Because our oldest son was sick, I held him and paced in front of our TV and watched the results until CNN projected George W. Bush’s winning Florida and thus the election around 1:15 a.m.
I put our son to bed, watched about an hour longer, and then went to the kitchen to clean up, and for some reason turned the TV back on to hear NBC report that the margin was strangely tightening despite the networks’ projection. That seemed too bizarre to be true, so I turned off the TV and went to bed.
An hour later, we were in the hospital emergency room because our son started coughing. The doctors gave us the news he … had a cold. I got 90 minutes of sleep that night, which was 90 more minutes of sleep than anyone working in daily media.
Wisconsin Public Television had a Friday-night public affairs show, “WeekEnd,” where I occasionally appeared as a pundit. The Friday after elections “WeekEnd” had what it called the Election Hangover Show. I ran into a fellow panelist who had announced he was leaving the show after the election; he pointed out that he couldn’t retire if the election wasn’t over.
The election was certainly not over. Those who follow politics learned more than they ever wanted to about Florida election law. (You age yourself if you know the meaning of the term “hanging chads.”) I was sending daily emails to readers of my business magazine making observations and predictions based on logic … predictions that were almost all wrong.
That election finally ended one month later, when our viewing of NBC’s “Law & Order” was interrupted by Tom Brokaw’s announcement of a “split decision,” which, as NBC’s Carl Stern and Dan Abrams reported, was not a split decision at all.
In my lifetime, the 1968, 1976, 1992 and 2004 elections weren’t called until Wednesday. In case you think that’s late, 2000 proves there is such a thing as later. Much later.
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I have lots of choices for readers to click upon, because it’s a busy weekend.
Want my nonpartisan view of the election? Click here.
Yesterday started Movember, a month in which men should grow mustaches to increase awareness of prostate cancer (complications of which killed my grandfather). I can’t grow what I already have, but you can read my dissertation on facial hair.
Yesterday also started National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I wish I could find the “Novel ideas” piece I wrote on the late (and apparently wiped-from-the-Internet) Marketplace of Ideas blog. This post is about the broadcast version of fiction, specifically cop TV, and this post is about reporters in movies and TV. Keep this in mind: Fiction has to make sense.
To hear me announce a Level 3 high school football playoff game between Lancaster (wishbone) and Durand (single-wing), click here Saturday before 2 p.m.
Daylight Savings Time ends Sunday at 2 a.m. For my view on DST, click here.
And for those interested in how their votes may be predicted by their tastes in entertainment, peruse on:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 