Tag: Journalism

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Barry Goldwater Campaigns in Cairo

I’m not sure whether to count Barry Goldwater as the first presidential candidate I covered or the second. Barry was in Cairo on Oct. 2, 1964, but I had covered Ronald Reagan stumping FOR Goldwater in Sikeston earlier for The Jackson Pioneer. To be honest, I think I was more impressed by Reagan than Goldwater.

I was prepared when I went to see Reagan. I had a 4×5 Speed Graphic camera, a 35mm camera and a Polaroid camera. I’m sure I had a dozen backup pencils and, maybe, even a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Find the Central students in the crowd

[Note: click on the photos to make them larger. There are a lot of interesting faces in the crowd. Once you get into the gallery, you can click on the left or right side of the photo to move backwards and forwards to the other images.]

I haven’t run across my film and clips from the Sikeston Reagan speech, but I’ll never forget writing the story. I’ve probably recounted it before, but, that’s what happens when you get old.

I was sitting at the typewriter churning out pages and pages of copy. Since we were a Republican newspaper, I was given a lot of latitude.

One more word about Reagan….

Just then, the double doors separating the newsroom from the composing room slammed open and a burly, ink-stained wretch came charging at me with my copy wadded up in fists that were short a finger or two. “Kid, you type one more F-‘ing word and I’ll break your fingers.”

Mother didn’t raise any fools. I quickly typed – 30 – which is newspaperspeak for The End, and handed him my last sheet. He snatched it up and disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.

I had just met the new Linotype operator. The Jackson Pioneer was an unusual place to work. If the Linotype operator didn’t agree with an editorial, he’d simply refuse to set it.

The universal media scowl

Maybe all these newsmen and women started out at small papers like I did. That would explain the carefully cultivated squint and universal scowls on the faces. Or, it might just be that they had heard Barry’s standard speech a hundred times before and they were wondering where they were going to end up for lunch.

Central High Tiger represented

Jim Stone, Shari Stiver and Sally Wright covered the rally for the Central High School Tiger. Jim had the school’s 4×5 Crown Graphic camera and Shari and Sally shared a byline on the Oct. 23 front-page story.

Despite their expressions, the story said “The impressions of the two editors who covered this story for The Tiger was mainly one of pure excitement. ‘We had our own press passes and sat in the very front of the press box, and they even fed us,’ said Sally Wright, 12B.

“‘And we saw every detail,’ added Shari Stiver, 12B.”

The Tiger story and photos

The editors weren’t the only ones excited. They quoted Pat Sommers as saying, “I shook his hand twice – I’ll never wash my hands again!”

Barbara Nunnelly sounded less impressed. “He’s different from what I expected, but he’s a very good speaker,” she said.

Access to candidates

Something that strikes me today is the access the press (and the public) had to a presidential candidate in 1964. You can tell from the variety of angles that I was all over the place. You have to remember that John F. Kennedy had been shot less than a year before. When I looked around the Cairo High School football field where the rally was held, I saw all kinds of places where a sniper could be hiding, and felt distinctly uneasy.

I love crowd shots

That ability to move around and pick your own photo angles was quickly quashed in the coming years. By the time Jimmy Carter was elected, you had to submit requests for media credentials well in advance of the visit. You had to provide a photo, DOB, place of birth and a whole raft of other info before you got your credential.

What that was mostly good for was so they could herd you into a tightly controlled spot where you could shoot only what they wanted you to shoot, from the angle they wanted you to shoot it, when they wanted it shot. It irked me no end to go through all those security checks only to be kept farther back than the general public and have to deal with a stage-managed photo op. (Can we say, “Mission Accomplished?”)

Not every PR idea works

I don’t know if the concept of Goldwater Girls was a local idea or one cooked up by the campaign folks, but it has to go down as a really bad idea. I can just see the girls saying, “You want us to dress up HOW? And be seen in public?”

Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater Girl

Holy Cow! It WASN’T a local idea.

I just Googled “Goldwater Girl” and the first story to pop up was an account of a Charles Gibson interview with Hilary Clinton that quoted her as saying, “My best friend and I became quote ‘Goldwater Girls. We got to wear cowboy hats. We had a sash that said, you know, I voted AUH2O. I mean, it was really a lot of fun.”

Relatives spinning in their graves

I was an ardent Barry Goldwater supporter. My grandmother, Elsie Welch, was in the hospital before the 1964 election. She said, “I know you wish you were old enough to vote for Goldwater. If you get me an absentee ballot, I’ll cast my vote for him for you.”

I went to the Clerk of Courts, picked up the absentee ballot and took it to the hospital. She made a blue X to vote a straight Republican ticket and said, “I can hear my relatives spinning in their graves because I just voted for a Republican.”

I knew she wasn’t registered to vote, so I didn’t file the ballot just to have it thrown out. I’ve held on to it for all these years as something to remember my grandmother by.

Unless she’s reading this over my shoulder – and I wouldn’t rule that out – she never knew that her vote didn’t count.

Goldwater Rally Photo Gallery

As mentioned earlier, click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

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As American as Apple Pie: Shooting Gabrielle Giffords

It started with a Facebook post by Bob Rogers, a photographer I worked with in Athens, Ohio, back in the late 60s: “Extremists win by murder. Gabrielle Giffords shot this morning. I hope all who preach hate are happy. You are succeeding in tearing apart our once great country.”

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Garbrielle Giffords was at first. I had to search for the first cryptic stories on Google news to discover she was an Arizona Congresswoman who had been marked by crosshairs on a Sarah Palin website and had beaten a Tea Party candidate who liked to campaign by letting his followers shoot automatic weapons. Bob, who knew her from her work on cycling projects called her a “great centrist public servant.”

As the news reports trickled in, I couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive and the toll of dead and wounded kept fluctuating. I still don’t know the final count.

Two quotes crossed my mind. H. Rap Br own, the black activist of the 1960s, who coined the phrase, “Violence is as American as apple pie,” and a verse from John Fogerty’s anti-war song, Deja Vu (All Over Again):

Did you hear ’em talkin’ ’bout it on the radio
Did you try to read the writing on the wall
Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before
It’s like Deja Vu all over again

John F. Kennedy 1963

I’ve written before about my memories of the JFK assassination. This was our generation’s loss of innocence.

Martin Luther King 1968

I was photo editor of The Ohio University Post in 1968 when Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. When I wrote about a Peter, Paul and Mary Concert, fellow campus reporter Carol Towarnicky reminded me that the concert was the night after MLK was killed.

She shared her recollection of the night, “my personal memory of that was that there was some kind of big meeting on campus — wasn’t there always? — and i was alone at the post since i was the campus editor – when i got a call from one of the editors at The Messenger. Their AP (Associated Press teletype) was turned off for the evening and he said he had heard a rumor about King being shot and would i check — and i was just about to get up from my chair when i heard the bells for a bulletin..”

What I most remember was how close the university came to violence. Several hundred black students staged a sit-in in the middle of the major intersection in town. That wasn’t unusual, but an Athens police captain whose face was usually as red as his neck wasn’t going to tolerate black  folks doing that.

He was about to have his men wade into the crowd with billy clubs swinging when a university administrator offered to defuse the situation. He pulled one of the student leaders aside and asked how long the student thought they were going to sit there to prove their point. There was some give and take, then the administrator when back to the captain and said, “Give them X minutes and they’ll move on peacefully.” Fortunately, that’s what happened.

Robert F. Kennedy 1968

We had just put the paper to bed and a bunch of us decided to walk down town to Jake’s, the only place open late at night. It was known best for its night fry cook, a woman so large she could barely fit between the counter and the grill. When she walked, she was so short of breath her mouth would bite chunks of air like a guppy on its last fins. After having a burger with her special sauce – she dripped sweat onto the grill the whole the time she cooked – we headed back to the office to call it a night.

A student ran up and said that RFK had just been shot. We thought he was kidding or drunk until we got back and checked the wires.

I can’t wait until I get to my negatives of that era. I shot some memorable photos of students reacting to the news of those two murders.

George Wallace 1972

I was chief photographer at The Gastonia Gazette when the news of the attempt on George Wallace’s life came across the wires.

I had just spent several days on the campaign trail with North Carolina governor Terry Sanford, who was a long-shot candidate for president. I really liked the guy. He and Florida Governor / Senator Bob Graham were two men I always hoped would end up in The Big Seat. I hoped that Wallace dropping out of the race might boost Sanford’s chances, but that wasn’t to be.

Gerald Ford 1975 (Twice)

The odd thing about the attempts on Gerald Ford’s life is that I don’t have any strong recollections of covering anything related to them. Maybe by that time shooting political figures had become so commonplace it stopped being something you remembered.

About the only thing I remember about Gerald Ford was when he came to South Florida to campaign for a term of his own. It was a tough sell because a lot of folks hadn’t forgiven him for pardoning Richard Nixon.

The day was unseasonably cold for Florida and there was a steady rain falling as he made it down the coast from one end of the region to the other. I looked at him as he drove by in an open convertible, soaked to the skin by the cold rain, but still waving at everyone he passed. “This guy really WANTS this job,” I recalled thinking.

I ended up voting for him. After the dark Dick Nixon days, I thought he was an honorable man who did what he thought was best for the country, even though it was probably political suicide.

Ronald Reagan 1981

Former President Richard Nixon was supposed to speak at some kind of gathering in Palm Beach. Representatives of the organization, security folks and the local media were meeting to work out the details of the visit when I got a radio call that President Reagan had been shot.

We media types looked at each other, came to the conclusion that a possibly dead current President was a bigger story than a future visit from a disgraced ex-President, so there was a bolt for the doors.

Let’s dial back the hate speech

“We know that silence equals consent when atrocities are committed against innocent men, women and children. We know that indifference equals complicity when bigotry, hatred and intolerance are allowed to take root. And we know that education and hope are the most effective ways to combat ignorance and despair.” ~ Gabrielle Giffords

In one of the rare instances of civility in the last presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain took the microphone away from a woman who said that Barack Obama was “an Arab,”and countered a man who said he was “scared…to bring up a child under an Obama presidency: “I have to tell you that he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States. He’s a decent family man that I happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. There’s a difference between rhetoric and record, but you can still be respectful. I will point out his record and I will do it with respect.”

His comments were met with boos.

Did that voice inside you say I’ve heard it all before
It’s like Deja Vu all over again


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Thebes Railroad Bridge

Southeast Missourian webmaster and bridgehunter James Baughn had a piece on photographing the world’s largest operating steam engine when it crossed over the Thebes Railroad Bridge in 2004. That got me to rooting around for some of the photos I’ve shot of it over the years.

Thebes in 2010

It’s hard to get a feel for just how massive this bridge is from a distance. This photo was taken this spring when the Mississippi River was above flood stage. What used to be downtown Thebes has been reduced to a few roads, some foundations and some park structures.

Thebes in 1966

This shot of the bridge from the Thebes Courthouse in 1966 shows the same area before the floods of 1973 and 1993 took their toll on the town.

Railroad Bridge and Thebes Courthouse

I’ll have more photos of the Thebes Courthouse when I run across a few more. The courthouse was built in 1848 out of local sandstone, hewn timbers, hand-sawed boards, plaster and with a split shingle roof.

Dred Scott was imprisoned in a dungeon below the courthouse.

Bridge built in 1905

James’ BridgeHunter site has additional photos, including some of it under construction. His information says it was built in 1905 by a consortium of five railroad companies.

The massive structure is beginning to show its age. I can’t remember ever seeing it when it was freshly painted. It still carries a lot of Union Pacific rail traffic on its two tracks. I’ve read that there was talk about the bridge carrying automobile traffic as well as trains, but the Cape Girardeau Traffic Bridge killed off that idea.

Pier stone weighs 6,000 pounds

To give another idea of its size, the plaque on this stone says it is “Original handhewn pier block from the Mississippi River Bridge at Thebes built in 1905. Recovered from the river in 1990. Block weight 6,000 lbs.”

Piers dwarf Honda Odyssey

The huge piers on the Illinois side of the river dwarf my Honda Odyssey.

I left a comment on the Bridgehunter site:

As the cub reporter fresh out of high school, I ended up writing an awful lot of obits for The Southeast Missourian.

One, in particular, stuck out in my mind. The singular most exciting thing in this woman’s life was that she was on the first train to cross the Thebes RR bridge. I thought it was sad that that was the high point of her life.

What does it say about the arc of my life and career that I would remember that woman four decades later?

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Silver Dollar Tavern

The Missourian ran a story this morning about a man who died jumping off the Old Appleton Bridge. A reader asked if that was the same Castor River bridge I showed kids jumping off in another post.

The answer is, “No.” Wrong body of water, wrong bridge. The caller who reported the drowning said the man had jumped off the “red bridge” and had not surfaced. There used to be a water-powered mill just downstream of this bridge. A dam created a deep pool of water that made a good swimming hole.

I’ll write about the Old Appleton bridges later. The bridge on Highway 61 that replaced the “red bridge” was a death trap that The Missourian campaigned hard to get replaced. I spent a lot of time shooting wrecks there.

Silver Dollar Tavern

When we slowed down in Old Appleton this spring, I figured I’d better shoot the landmark Silver Dollar Tavern while it was still – barely – standing. The local gathering place had pool tables, a dance floor and a bar. I’ve read that a lot of Blues music was played there.

I don’t know how old the building is. A Google search of The Missourian’s archives popped up a story from 1948, so it’s at least as old as I am. I’m going to throw in a bunch of stories that ran in the Old Appleton News column over the years. Most of them were written by Rip Schnurbusch.

District News Editor herds stringers

One of my many jobs at The Missourian was District News Editor, riding herd over our country correspondents, or stringers, as they were called. They got the name of “stringers” because they were paid by the column inch and it was easier to measure their copy with a string at the end of the pay period instead of using a ruler and having to do math.

Being a young, serious journalist, I would edit their copy with a meat axe. One day, Editor John Blue called me in and said to cut them some slack. “Not much happens in these little towns, so they make do the best they can. Besides, their little asides are what make their columns fun to read.”

Non-linear journalism

Now that I’ve become a non-linear journalist myself, I can appreciate what jBlue was telling me. I’ve grown to appreciate Rip and Anne Withers from Delta and Anne Lattimore from Charleston in my old age, even though they drove me crazy when I had to read their hen scratch copy. To make it worse, they would send the same stories to three or four papers; you were lucky if you got the TOP copy and not the fourth carbon.

I just discovered a whole manila folder of stringer copy marked “Funny File.” We’ll save it for another time.

This one is too good not to share. It illustrates the news judgment of my stringers: A singing convention was held at the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Parma Sunday afternoon with feature singers of the Campbell Trio of Gideon. The convention was interrupted by a fire which destroyed the home of John Barker. [Emphasis mine. Mind you, this wasn’t even the TOP item.]

A Smattering of Old Appleton News

  • June 23, 1948 – Jean Balsmann, proprietor of the Silver Dollar Tavern, has added ice cream to his stock.
  • April 20, 1949 – Barney Balsmann, owner of the Silver Dollar Tavern, and his son, Gene, who operates the tavern, are building an addition to the building which will house several pool tables.

  • May 19, 1948 – A chicken fry was held Tuesday night at Silver Dollar Tavern for young men of the community.
  • F.C. Sewing recently purchased a sow and seven pigs from Barney Balsmann.
  • Oct. 13, 1948 – Miss Verda Weisbrod was honored at a miscellaneous shower last week at the Silver Dollar Tavern given by Mrs. Hugo Triller, Marilyn Weisbod and Betty J. Schnurbusch.
  • A tree felled last weekend by Millard Esters and Edward Jarigan killed a raccoon which had holed up in the tree. The impact of the tree, which was to be used to firewood, killed the animal.
  • May 16, 1962 – The Perry County Saddle Club held its monthly meeting Monday night at the Silver Dollar Tavern with a good attendance. Refreshments were served.
  • March 21, 1963 – Classified ad: SILVER DOLLAR TAVERN: For sale or lease. See or contact Gene Balsman, Perryville, MO.
  • March 31, 1965 – The Silver Dollar Tavern changed hands over the weekend, the new owner being Van Ferral.
  • April 30, 1970 – There is one less pony in town. The Edgar Blechle children lost one of their pet ponies this past week when the animal got loose, ran on the highway, and was hit by a small van truck belonging to the Saveway Oil Co. of Scott City.
  • Mr. and Mrs. B.C. Humphrey moved from the Wally Unterreiner home into the former Schaeffer home over the weekend. Mr. Humphrey is employed at the Farmers Limestone Co. as a heavy equipment operator, and Mrs. Humphrey is a cook at the Silver Dollar Tavern. [I wonder how long they had to live there before their domicile would be called the Humphrey home?]


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