Behind the Headlines

By Danielle Portteus, danielle@bedfordnow.com

Monday morning I went to New Bedford Academy and witness what might be the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Neil Sauter, a Blissfield resident, talked about overcoming his mild case of cerebral palsy to the students. He did some magic tricks and storytelling methods to teach students to work together and overcome challenges.
Neil began his trek across the state Monday, an 830-mile walk on STILTS from Lambertville to the Michigan-Wisconsin border in the Upper Peninsula.
He’s raising money for United Cerebral Palsy, a non-profit organization that donates wheelchairs and other assistance devices to people who cannot otherwise afford them.
Check out the rest of Neil’s story at:
http://monroenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080506/BN_NEWS/878392659/-1/BN

Brian Bosch took some fabulous photos too… you should definitely check those out.

To track Neil’s progress, visit his Web site, www.stiltstory.org

By Stephanie Ariganello; stephaniea@monroenews.com

I happened to be on call yesterday - just in case something had to be covered or reported on. On Christmas, it usually has to be something big to warrant a call in.
So, I was a little shocked to get a call from both my editor and the editor of the paper. However, when they informed me that our second-generation editor and former president of Monroe Publishing and The Monroe Evening News, Grattan Gray died earlier that day, it was clear why.

I would be the one putting together the story on his life and his death. Talk about intimidating.

Knowing that Mr. Gray has such an enmeshed history in not just our paper, but the community at large, I came in last night to read through clips and old articles to get a sense of who he was and what he did in his life. The more I read, the more I realized just how enormous a task it is to summarize a person, their life and actions and what they’ve contributed to a community. Mr. Gray may be an exception in general, simply because he did so much.

I met Mr. Gray maybe two times since I’m relatively new to the newsroom. I had heard stories and knew he was held in high regard by some of the more esteemed of my colleagues, but I had no idea. He had spent more than 70 years in the newspaper industry - (70!) something that is inconceivable. What I found I really liked about him, as I was reading, was his drive to try new things, to keep things moving and to keep an eye on the little things but only while knowing how the big picture was shaping up.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not the strongest obituary/life story writer (when it comes to newspaper). I get caught up on the whole how would this person want their story to go? aspect a little too much. Plus, space and time are the usual constraints. With someone like Mr. Gray who had been a writer and newspaperman for so long, when I went to type, my fingers wouldn’t move. I was cracking - not something that usually happens to me when under pressure.

That was, until I read a column that Steve Gray, Grat’s son wrote in 1995 when his dad was handing over leadership of the company. The column, titled “From a son to a father:” starts off with the words “thank you.” Steve goes on to summarize kind of how I was feeling in the next few lines. (Obviously the sentiment from a son to a father was beyond anything I was experiencing, but I felt similarly overwhelmed.)

“Ours is a family where words come easily and sentiment doesn’t.” Steve wrote. In journalism, this is the hope - that words flow, but emotions don’t.

“But this is a time when I feel a powerful urge to say something special,” he continued. “There’s so much I could say that I scarcely know where to begin,” he wrote. “So I’ll keep it simple.”

So, that’s what I tried to do. I missed the mark. And my editor did some rewriting - but with the history we have in the newsroom and the collaborative nature of it, we were able to put something together that tells Mr. Gray’s story and also highlights his many accomplishments.

By Charles Slat
ctslat@monroenews.com
He was sitting under a canopy set up on the tarmac at Custer Airport, his white hair shielded from the heat of a late July day.
Members of the Young Marines scampered to and fro, seemingly oblivious to the historical figure that sat at a table behind a couple stacks of books.
I guess I expected a long line in front of Ret. Gen. Paul Tibbets when I showed up at one of the airport’s “Living History” days in 2001. There were only a few queued before him.
I introduced myself and Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, invited me to sit down.
Before I arrived, I had wondered if I even would be able to speak with him and, if so, what would I ask a guy who was responsible for the instantaneous deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – grandmas, moms, children and babies among them — innocently going about their lives on Aug. 6, 1945.
Tibbets was in his mid-80s when I met him, sharp and articulate.
I asked an obvious and probably hackneyed question – one that he probably had been asked thousands of times.
“Any regrets?”
“Why would I have regrets?” he replied without hesitation. “I was just a soldier doing my job.”
Clearly, this wasn’t just a rehearsed response. It was his belief.
Tibbets, who died Thursday at 92, didn’t ask to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, he didn’t want to be in a war with Japan. But he was in the Air Force, he was given a mission, and he carried it out.
At the Living History day, he was selling his memoir, “Return of the Enola Gay.” It isn’t just a chronicle of his career and the bombing. It’s a history lesson.
The lesson is this: Throughout history, good soldiers follow orders. It is their duty and most do it unwaveringly. How well they do it often is the difference in who wins and who’s vanquished.
Here’s how Tibbets put it in his book: “Fact is, in 1945, I was simply an airman, a pilot. Wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army Air Forces, I was – as I has sworn to do – following the orders of my Commander in Chief. To the best of my abilities and the limits of my strength and endurance, I was doing what I could to bring the war to an expeditious and victorious conclusion. There was nothing heinous or monstrous about that.”
I talked with Tibbets for about an hour on that July day and my thoughts occasionally would race back to the scenes at the Hiroshima Peace Park, which I visited on an early spring morning in 1986. The park is a solemn place, a lasting memorial so that no one forgets.
Tibbets, I realized, never forgot.
“It is a sobering thought that our two bombs, feeble by today’s standards, were the curtain-raiser on what many view as the supreme human tragedy,” he wrote in his book. “Mankind’s best hope is that the prologue was so frightening that the main show will be canceled.”
If that is Tibbets’ legacy, generations to come will owe him a debt of gratitude.

Hello out there. In the world of “citizen journalism” I thought it might be helpful to post some information for people who want to become more involved in reporting on their community.

The first is an interactive list on citizen journalism brought to you by the International Journalists’ Network. The link is http://ijnet.org/interactive/blog_guide/1/module.html
or click here for a direct link.

This one is brought to you by the Knight Citizen News Network at www.kcnn.org/ or click here.

Or, if you’re interested, you can sign up to be part of News University at www.newsu.org or by clicking here. Once your signed up you can try out the “Be a reporter game” and other courses that use interactive teaching methods.
Disclaimer: While the game might have the overtones of what it’s like to be a reporter in the field and it’s kind of fun to play, it is highly unrealistic. There is no way on earth an ER doctor would hand over a list of kids who were brought from the school with suspected food poisoning. He or she may give some hints, but it would never be in the open, and, by the way, a reporter would not even be allowed on the floor unless it were special circumstances.
Also, good luck trying to get past any kind of school administrator/PR person to speak with a lunch lady. Not going to happen, unless you know how to finesse someone you have a long-standing relationship with (even then, probably not), sneak into the school through an open door or happen to be related to the person.
The reason this irks me so much is because it implies it’s easy to capture information when in real life we have to fight for every nugget we get. But it does provide an accurate idea of how many places we have to go and how many people we have to talk to, just to confirm the information we already have.

Is this something you are interested in? Let me know what you think.

It was right about this time six years ago that hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people and setting off a whole chain of events that is still being played out.

Like most people, I remember where I was very vividly. I was on the phone with my mom, who called to wish me a happy birthday, and I was checking to make sure my bag was packed since I was driving to Minnesota later that day for a job interview. She had to check the other line because someone kept calling. When she came back she said something like “America is under attack.” File that under chilling words and things you don’t really ever expect your mom to say during birthday call.

So much has been said and felt about Sept. 11. About the people who were killed, about the terrorists, about the war that still follows. I don’t have much to add.

But I was thinking the other day about this. What was I doing on Sept. 10? Or Sept. 9? Or any of the days directly proceeding the event? What shoes was I wearing? What was I thinking about? Just the little things that seem like nothing, but when you can’t remember, feels like something is lost.
Maybe really happy events also leave such marks, but the human brain seems to operate more in the way of remembering negative experiences stronger. I very much remember what I was thinking that day, what happened next and what I did next. I remember what shoes I wore. It’s much more than I would have remembered about any other day that took place six years ago - birthday or otherwise. In some way, the marking of horrible or even less heinous acts (my friend Sue once stepped in dog poop on her way into my house, another regular Sue visit, but I remember it only because she tracked poop throughout before realizing - something I probably would have forgotten without the unfortunate tracking.)

So when I see those signs - Never Forget - I think, how could we? I know people need to move one and maybe we stop having public events, or the blood drives start to dwindle on years between the milestones. But, we’ve shared an intensely personal experience collectively and it’s not going away anytime soon.

By Paula Wethington

Monroe’s sister city visitors from Hofu, Japan, arrived last week. The five students are staying with local host families until Aug. 14. The chaperones flew home Sunday.

My family has been involved with Monroe’s sister city program hosted by the Monroe International Friendship Association since we hosted one of the Japanese students in 2001. So the summer student exchange season is always a fun time of year for us.

One of this year’s Hofu chaperones, Makiko Fujimoto, is a public information officer at Hofu City Hall. She and I chatted quite a bit during her stay since our jobs are in similar fields.

Makiko told me she had a deadline to meet in Japan this week. As soon as she got back to the office on Monday, she was expected to write an article for the city newsletter about her trip and what the students are doing!

Here’s Makiko and I at one of the sister city social events on Saturday:

Update: The story of Margaret Stevens, the woman whose golf cart was nabbed, seemed to reach all kinds of different people. Margaret’s daughter, Kathleen, originally wrote a letter to the newspaper on what was lost during the burglary and we thought it would make a good story.

I liked the idea of doing the story because, while we often report on crimes that happen, it’s rare that we report on the other side of that unless the person is physically harmed. Even then, it’s usually just the straight facts, though occasionally we’ll get an in-depth perspective from a victim. So the end result was what I suspected would happen.

Kathy and Margaret were contacted by different people - all wanting to either offer sympathies and to tell them to keep faith or to offer them some sort of transportation for Margaret since she couldn’t get around as well without the golf cart.

Eventually a couple donors came up with another golf cart. A year older than the original, but just as zippy and just as liberating than the one that was stolen. Though they had to go through the ordeal, they ended up with their faith in people reinvigorated.

Read more about it soon in the MEN.

I just submitted a story for the health page on Lyme Disease. Nothing out of the ordinary. Except, working on this story has intersected with my life. Each of the symptoms, the prognosis - it wasn’t just something that happens to other people; it was something that will or has happened to one of my people.
Someone close to me has Lyme Disease. He contracted it a few years ago as an employee of a state’s DNR department. It started with really sore muscles, a sore neck he couldn’t move, heart palpitations and eventually Bell’s Palsy - paralysis of his facial muscles. All this and the guy was still commuting 7 miles each way on his bike to and from work, digging holes and clearing paths in the mid-July weather.

Since he was on the east coast where they’re a little more familiar with the disease - it was named after a town in Connecticut where most of the population complained of similar health problems - it was a somewhat quick diagnosis. However, the nature of the beast is that it’s never truly gone for some people.

The more I researched, the more I cringed. Of course I had researched it then, when he first came down with it, but in the last few years more information has become concrete. Advances have been made. The uncertainty, the maybe it could do this horrible thing to you is the worst part.

After meeting with Tammy Soncrant and her mother, and seeing the pain she was in and the degeneration of her health that she credits to Lyme Disease, it became a very real thing. I thought about all the regular aches my person has. All of the tiredness. The irritability and mood swings - which is considered a side effect of LD. It brought it all under a microscope. For the last week, it’s been at the top of my mind. I guess, to a degree, I’ve become more sympathetic, a little less annoyed with the frequent “but my legs feel weird” complaint.

Tammy has been planning her funeral as a result of her current state of health. She contacted the news because she said she wanted to create more awareness of the disease and let people know it happens here. If one person, she said, was able to benefit from her story, then it was worth telling it.

If I count, then it’s already worked.

Yeah, so this is quite gross - be warned. But anyone who’s been visited by the ticket fairy knows what place the impulse comes from.

A Minnesota guy apparently was ticked off by a parking ticket, sent in the payment and a little something extra that originated with his dog.

Read the article here.

This is good news, I think, but it leaves an awful lot of questions unanswered.

Last week I met with one of the more interesting people I’ve gotten to interview. Rebecca Sacks, an 87 year old woman, was more on top of it than most people are at half her age. To call her a tough old bird - in the best possible way of course - or other cliches attempting to bespeak her charm and intelligence would turn a dynamic individual into a one-dimensional depiction.

The profile on her runs today in the paper in the “Your Neighbor” section. What, you ask, was so outstanding about this person? Aside from the obvious age often equals wisdom - our older generations have quite a bit to offer and shouldn’t necessarily be relegated to homes to slowly wither and dribble - she spoke intelligently, humbly, humorously and honestly about her life. She didn’t talk as though it was over. She talked about reading to stay informed and to continue to be an interesting person.

She told me about first coming to Monroe (”oh, don’t put this in your story,” she said.) She was terribly lonely. Her husband had gone off to war, so she worried about him. His family had left the area right around the time they moved here. She didn’t know anyone and had come from bustling Chicago, where all of her friends and family were. She was also, and still is, a religious minority. Her Jewish faith is strong; she is literally about 1 of 25 practicing Jewish people in the City of Monroe. She pushed on. She joined. She mingled. She lived, contributing to Monroe since 1940 and still doing just that.

I guess as I write about this, it’s more difficult than I thought - pinning down what it is about certain people. Maybe I was in the right mood. Maybe this came at a time in my life that was receptive to this. Mrs. Sacks did mention the Jewish concept of “bashert” or destiny, finding where one is supposed to be in life. But overall I got the impression, this was just a scratch, like I was looking through a little portal rather than entering the room.

I should mention that this is one of the great parts of the job. It’s the nicer, opposite side of having to go into a tragedy and ask probing questions. As reporters we get a kind of license to ask things that others are reluctant to ask but want to know the answers.