We went to a party. They aren’t my best pictures, but they were more fun than most.
A word about processing people pictures from parties. I use a lot of creative effects on people pictures because what I want to show is their faces, their laughter, the fun without making every look like they have the neck of a chicken or, as Garry puts it “the chrome dome.”
Everyone wants to look good. Most people our age don’t expect to look young and they don’t mind seeing character in their faces, but they also don’t want to look like they were just unearthed from a grave. Finding a balance is a bit of a trick. I put more time and energy into processing people — especially people in my age group — than I do for anything else.
Trees don’t care if the bark looks grungy, but people care a lot when their skin looks like tree bark.
Once a year, we gather to catch up. It’s time for the getting together and annual partaking of the M.O.B. party. It’s the Media Of Boston where everyone who used to be someone and more than a few people who still are someone, get together and remember news — the funny, the weird, the crazy, and the scary stuff they covered during Boston’s news history.
Garry and Harvey Leonard, famed meteorologist sharing old Dodger baseball memories
I usually don’t go to these things. Part of it is that we are out in the boonies and all these events are in Boston or Dorchester. It’s a long drive through heavy traffic. As a general rule, I can’t find my way anywhere anymore. I never really could, but now that we don’t live in or near the city, it’s worse.
Lots of pictures of “the old days”
Marilyn promised to come with me this year, acting as my ears (she just went around telling everyone to yell in my left ear and oddly, that worked), and as my navigator which mostly meant yelling out the directions from the GPS. It’s not loud enough. Almost nothing is loud enough.
Andy announced dinner about to be served!
In past years, most of us were competitors at Boston’s major TV News Departments, radio stations, and newspapers. Unlike media elsewhere, we always had a sense of respect, camaraderie between us — even though we all chased the scoops in one of the most competitive major news markets in the country.
Three guys hanging out!
Careers overlap the end of radio news dominance, the transition from film to electronic news gathering. Some of us began working with elders from the Murrow Boys’ days. Our careers included covering the assassinations of political and social legends, the Vietnam War, volatile court ordered school busing and integration, Anti-Nuclear Power demonstrations, Watergate, Three Mile Island and the AIDS epidemic. The end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st saw an explosion of news coverage to match events like 9/11 and beyond.
Birth twins! Garry with Delores Handy (Brown) – both born April 7th!
Many of those at our newsies gathering have put their lives on the line — multiple times — in pursuit of the truth which is often ridiculed by some public officials.
Charlie and Irene Ballantine – caught off-guard at the table!
The faces are probably familiar to those who have turned to the Boston media for news coverage for the past half a century. Critics who have questioned their ethics have faded from public view as new crises demand instant and intensive coverage 24/7.
Something to drink?
Some of these careers began with Dwight Eisenhower in the Oval House, John F.Kennedy as the Junior Massachusetts Senator and Mayor Kevin Hagen White overseeing the transformation of Boston into a world-class city that would host celebrated Tall Ships festivals, court ordered school integration and a mega-expensive architectural “do” known as “The Big Dig”.
Garry, Lester, and Harvey. Someone is really tall!
Those of a certain age will remember some of these faces as young reporters and photographers who spent the best years of their lives covering stories that are now archive material.
You may not know some of the faces. Many are behind the cameras that bring you haunting images of the news that never stops. They are reporters who never get their due respect. They’re part of the reason that Boston News coverage is highly respected around the world.
Many of us were bright-eyed idealists when we began our Boston careers. The city and New England region are journalistic gold mines and have been well paved over the years by those seeking journalistic treasure.
You’re looking at many ink-stained wretches who’ve been recognized for their diligent work. Pulitzer, Emmy and other prestigious awards dot the homes of many of these folks who have devoted their lives to finding the truth, a job that is harder than ever in today’s political climate.
Our stories get bigger with each passing year. We remember the facts but, in many cases, prefer to “print the legend”. We tend to remember our gaffes, the “egg in our faces” stories that go with any lengthy career. We smile at the recollection of our youthful energy and pursuit of stories that would top the likes of Watergate.
Garry and Fred Ward sharing stories
Amid the laughter of shared adventures, we remember those colleagues we’ve lost in the past year. Their images linger in our collective and personal sense memories.
Most of all, we agree, bad times aside, we’ve been lucky to have spent years pursuing one of the best jobs on the face of the earth.
NOTE: Marilyn took pictures. Not enough and not as good as they should be — but she says she had the wrong camera. And it was hard to get people to stay put long enough to get a good shot. Also, there were so many cameras everywhere (what a surprise! with all those camera people and there were a lot of cameras!), she figured there would plenty of pictures getting taken, even if she personally didn’t take them.
I’m so confused. I used to think I had some handle on what was going on in the news. Pretty much all bad, all crazy, all the time. But I had definite opinions on how I thought things would play out.
No more. I’m clueless now. I have no idea what’s going to happen. I was sure that no matter what Trump did or what Mueller found, the Republicans in control of Congress would not do anything to censure, let alone impeach him. I thought we would have to wait for Democrats to regain control of both houses in Congress before impeachment could even be considered. And even then, I didn’t believe that there would be enough votes in the Senate to actually convict Trump and remove him from office. So any impeachment by the House would end up being a toothless gesture.
At that point, my brain would freeze over. I had no idea what would happen next in my own scenario.
Now I’m less certain about this whole theory. I’m really not sure what will happen in the future or even later today. So much happens so quickly these days. Often out of the blue, or so it seems. Trump makes spontaneous, off the cuff policy announcements that no one in his own White House knows about or is prepared for. He often backtracks the next day. Or not! Headline news stories blare out constantly with revelations from various investigations, law suits and ethics probes involving the president and his merry band of unethical misfits.
I worry that Trump will bomb a random country and start another pointless war. I live in fear that Trump will fire Robert Mueller or Rod Rosenstein, which would have the same effect. One minute I’m sure he’ll do it and throw the country into a major constitutional crisis with no satisfactory resolution in Republican controlled Washington. The next minute I’m sure he won’t risk the major political explosion he would trigger if he interfered with the Mueller investigation.
This perpetual uncertainty makes me very uncomfortable. I pride myself on staying informed enough to understand what’s going on in the news at any given time. I’m shaky on Mid Eastern and Far Eastern policy and economics. But I usually have a handle on domestic news and policies. I have to narrow my focus since I don’t want to spend even more time than I already do consuming news every day. I’m a slow reader so I can only cover so much territory.
Things are happening so quickly and so randomly that I can’t keep up any more. Even though I do try.
I have to admit that sometimes all the national drama can be exciting and energizing. But the crazy and the unpredictable are going into warp drive. Trump seems to be devolving and dragging us all under with him. It’s getting less and less exciting and more and more scary and insane.
I wish I could turn away from this slow motion train wreck, but I can’t. So I’ll keep reading and watching MSNBC and hope that my sanity survives longer than Trump’s does.
I have often written that 1969 was my favorite year … and explained why.
As a start, it was epic from a news viewpoint.
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in July 1969. I watched it. I had a baby that year and it might not have made the networks, but it was big news at my house.
So, as a new mother, I got to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. A real live guy walking — leaping — on the moon! We viewed it on CBS. It was obvious Walter Cronkite wanted to be up there with Neil and the rest of Apollo 11. He could barely control his excitement. He was nearly in tears. Me too.
The great Arthur C. Clarke was his guest for that historic news event. Neil Armstrong died a couple of years ago, an honorable man and a true American hero.
How I envied him his trip to the moon. I always tell Garry that if the Mother Ship comes and offers me a trip to the stars, I’m outta here. Maybe there would be room for him, too and we could travel together to the stars. Our final vacation. I hope the seats have better leg room than what we usually get.
Woodstock was a 1969 event too. Rumors were flying about this rock concert which would totally blow up the music world. I had friends who had tickets and were up, up and away. I was busy with a baby and wished them well.
There were hippies giving out flowers in Haight-Ashbury, but I was happier that year than I’d ever been before. I didn’t need to be in San Francisco. I was entirely okay with being right where I was.
I was young, healthy. I was sure we would change the world. End wars. Make the world better — for everyone. I was young enough to believe that our beliefs were enough make the changes and those changes would last forever. All the changes would be permanent.
It never crossed my mind that 50 years later, we’d be fighting the same battles again. I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as happy had a realized that nothing is permanent. No legislation is forever.
I figured we just needed to love each and it would fix everything. I still think if we had all learned to love each other, it would have fixed everything. For some strange reason, I thought the people I knew and cared for were all the people.
I never realized there were so many other people who hated everyone. People who loved no one, not even themselves. They would never be happy. Or allow anyone else to be happy either.
I had a baby boy and I sang “Everything’s Fine Right Now.” The song made a great wonderful lullaby and also, it made my baby boy laugh.
It was the year of the Miracle Mets. I watched as they took New York all the way to the top. New York went crazy for the Mets. A World Series win. 1969. What a year!
I wore patchwork bell-bottom jeans and rose-tinted spectacles. I had long fringes on my sleeves and a baby on my hip.
Music was wonderful. How young we were! We could do anything. The world belonged to us. I just knew it.
Decades passed; youth was a long time ago. The drugs we take control our blood pressure, not our state of consciousness. Today’s drugs aren’t much fun, but along with replacement heart valves and implanted breasts to replace the pair that tried to kill me, they keep me alive.
1969 was my year. But in its own weird way, all the years have come around again and today’s young people are fighting the same old battles — again. Fighting to get the assault weapons out of the hands of people who kill kids in schools and trying to make the world right. I want them to do a better job than we did.
Often, these days, I wonder what we accomplished. I’m sure we accomplished something. We probably brought the close of the Vietnam war, but so late and so many were dead by them. Maybe this group of kids who seem so determined and seem to get that voting is going to be how they will make the system work — maybe THEY will make things change and somehow keep the change alive.
Nothing lasts forever. Freedom is not free.
Regardless of how hard we work and how much we change the world, like a rubber band, “the world” will go back to where it was. The generation that follows change will forget how they got their freedom, so the next one will have to fight again. Freedom is the thing we fight for. Not once, but over and over and over again.
I wrote a blog about famous people that I have had connections with throughout my life. People like Gil Scott Heron, Chevy Chases’ father and brother, Celeste Holm, Erica Jong.
I was reading a review of the new movie about the tragedy involving Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick in 1969. I suddenly realized that I had worked with someone intimately involved with that story!
From the fall of 1971 to March of 1972, I worked at the New York State campaign headquarters for Edmund Muskie For President. The office was in midtown Manhattan and was run by a dynamic woman named Esther Newberg. She was a tough cookie. Very decisive, effective, organized and politically savvy. She had previously worked for the equally tough New York politician and women’s movement spokesperson, Bella Abzug.
Edmund Muskie
Esther had the responsibility of meeting with all the county leaders in the state and lining up commitments for Ed Muskie. She also ran the PR operations and supervised her New York Volunteer Coordinator, which was me.
I recruited eager local democratic volunteers and came up with things for them to do. We helped with frequent mass mailings (no computers) and with phone calls mobilizing other volunteers and politically active young people. I organized political events, usually involving a speaker, refreshments and lots of socializing. I think I may have done more to promote dating in New York City than Muskie’s political ambitions there.
Esther, on the right, in the late 1960’s
I have remembered Esther all these years. She was a person who made an impression. So when I read the review of “Chappaquiddick”, I was surprised to learn that a woman who had worked in Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign alongside Mary Jo Kopechne (who died in the Chappaquiddick accident), was no other than Esther Newberg. I googled her to make sure she was in fact the Esther Newberg I had worked for in the early 1970’s. She was.
Esther and Mary Jo were two of the six infamous ‘boiler room girls’ who worked for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1967-1968. They worked in a windowless room, affectionately called ‘the boiler room’. Each woman was assigned a regional desk and was tasked with coordinating all of the state campaign directors in that region, with the Washington campaign headquarters. They dealt with the key campaign issues of the day and reported directly to Bobby and his campaign manager and brother-in-law, Stephen Smith.
RFK and the ‘Boiler Room Girls’
Ethel Kennedy (Bobby’s wife) once said that “Only the great ones worked in that boiler room.” The ‘girls’ were known to be “frighteningly intelligent, politically astute, capable as all get out.” But they were just ‘girls’, which in those days was a stigma that was hard to overcome. The boiler room girls were often portrayed in the press as ‘party girls’ (not true) and of no significance to the campaign (also not true).
After Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June of 1968, the ‘girls’ dispersed to other jobs in politics. But they stayed in touch and got together for reunions. One of these reunions, which Ted Kennedy and Stephen Smith attended, was in July of 1969 in Chappaquiddick, near the Kennedy compound in Martha’s Vineyard.
Esther was at the party that night and watched her friend, Mary Jo, leave the party in a car with Ted Kennedy. The car inexplicably drove off a small bridge into the water. Kennedy got out of the submerged car but Mary Jo did not. Kennedy took 10 hours to report the incident. Many people feel he didn’t make enough of an effort to rescue Mary Jo. Others believe that if he had reported the accident immediately, there would have been enough time to save Mary Jo’s life. No one knows for sure.
The car after the accident
Headlines
Mary Jo Kopechne
Esther apparently had her name removed from the movie because she felt that too much had been made up and sensationalized.
The Chappaquiddick tragedy that ended Ted Kennedy’s presidential ambitions, as well as the ‘boiler room girls’, were part of my early political memories. So I was thrilled to learn that I had actually known someone who was part of that history. It’s not really a big deal. But I’m excited that I had two degrees of separation from Bobby and Ted Kennedy and this historical event.
Because you can’t use the word “p#rn” on Google because – y’know – they are so well-regulated and careful with who publishes on their boards. Yeah. It’s the word, you see, that’s the issue. NOT the subject of the writing. Do they have any human beings up there actually reading the material or is it all computers and buzzwords?
There was an interesting article in the news concerning a porn site called xhamster.com I don’t know why it’s called that and I really don’t want to know. They’re in the news because they closed off their website to anybody living in the state of North Carolina. Why? Because of the harsh, horrible anti-LGBT law they passed. If you log onto their website from anywhere in that state, you get a blank screen.
Blank screen for you!
The tone of all the news reports and nightly talk shows was that this was a funny but useless protest. There are thousands of other porn sites where North Carolinians can … well you know. But, as usual, the main stream media and the nightly talk shows missed the real story. I am not offering an opinion on the virtues or evils of porn. However, there is a larger truth which is widely known but rarely talked about regarding the porn industry. Porn has been a major driver, financial backer, and early adopter of technological innovation since the beginning. Since forever.
When mankind started drawing on cave walls, I guarantee you some of the first things depicted were people getting some Neanderthal Nookie.
thestar.com.my
Porn was very popular in the Middle Ages. Moreover, it utilized some of the earliest encryption technologies. I saw an exhibit in a museum once that showcased one of them. The exhibit consisted of huge tapestries painted with very strange distorted images. You couldn’t tell what they were.
What were they? Porn. The artist would draw the original naughty painting on a regular canvas. He would then look at the painting’s reflection in a cylindrical mirror. The image in the mirror would be all distorted. He would then paint that distorted image onto the tapestry. If you looked at the tapestry the painting made no sense.
arthit.ru
But. If you looked at the tapestry’s reflection in the same cylindrical mirror the artist used, the image would be reconstructed back to its original form. (“Naughty Knights 5”)
When photography was first invented in the 1800’s one of the earliest subjects was, of course, naked women. Having sex. When the telegraph was invented, telegraph operators were known to spend their off hours “telegraph sexting”.
I didn’t believe it either.
blog.kaspersky.com
OPERATOR ONE: Who you talking to?
OPERATOR TWO: I don’t know, but she sure can dit my dot!
The VCR became popular because porn producers started switching to videotape, abandoning film. Finally, you didn’t have to go to a movie theater for porn. You could “bring it home.” VHS beat out Betamax because the porn industry chose VHS. Really. No kidding. That’s the way it happened.
alf.image.com
Porn money propelled other technologies, too. Online payments, DVDs, streaming video, and two-way internet chat rooms. Virtual Reality headsets were only been available for a few months before there was Virtual Reality Porn.
truvisionvr.com
(I wouldn’t know this personally, but I read a lot).
So here’s the real story that everybody has missed. One porn site blocked off an entire state. It has been viewed as a symbolic, but mostly useless protest.
What if they all did it? What if all the porn sites got together and said to North Carolina: “NO PORN FOR YOU!”
I’ll bet you that anti-LGBT law would be overturned in about an hour and a half! Maybe less. Then, the porn industry would realize it’s true power! Imagine, Lysistrataon a national, even a global, scale!
dykiegirl.wordpress.com
“You won’t do what we want? NO PORN FOR YOU!” All the porn industry needs to do is come together. Organize.
Organize into a cartel.
A conglomerate
A Ring.
lotr.wiki.com
“One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them.
One ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.”
EDITOR’S NOTE:Stormy Daniels has a 1-hour interview scheduled on CBS this evening — 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper — at 7 PM. It’s the real deal show! Trump wanted his own show, and now, he’s getting it! Maybe not exactly how he planned it.
And the bartender says “What is this? Some kind of joke?”
The answer is, yes and no. It’s not a joke. It’s reality. In so far as reality has become a bigger and bigger joke these days, it is a joke. And the bar they walked into wasn’t a ‘bar’ bar. It was a legal bar.
So, what’s the joke? The president is suing a porn star, Stormy Daniels, because she broke a Non-Disclosure Agreement for talking about an affair the President insists never happened.
I’ve never met this woman!
He’s basically saying: “I did not have an affair with that person to whom I paid $130,000 to not talk about the affair we had.”
What’s the other joke? A former Playboy Playmate, Karen McDougal, is suing The National Enquirer because they bought an interview from her detailing the affair she had with the President.
I’ve never met this woman either!
They silenced her by simply not running the story. The punchline here? The guy who killed the story is named Pecker.
The jokes are the news.
There’s also a plaintiff, Summer Zervos, who is suing the President for defamation of character.
But that’s not funny. Not all news is funny.
I don’t think the news is supposed to be funny. These days, more and more of the news is funny. Absurdly funny. Or possibly ridiculous. Is there a difference? “You can’t make this shit up.”
How many times have we heard that phrase recently?News and comedy are becoming one.
Where do you get your news? The CBS Evening News or Stephen Colbert? The ABC Evening News or Jimmy Kimmel? CNN or The Daily Show?
I usually choose the latter because I get the same raw information, just with jokes. These days you get the jokes more and more just from reading the news.
When I worked on network news shows at CBS, we would have monitors showing the other networks. As you’d expect, all the shows did all the same stories in roughly the same order. Makes sense. These days, I notice the same stories on all the late night comedy shows too. The comedians all tell pretty much the same jokes in pretty much the same order. The thing is, they all thought the jokes up separately. But since the story is the same, they come up with the same jokes.
It’s just the news.
Comedy and news are becoming one.
I know I’m going to laugh when I watch The Daily Show. I expect to laugh. I’m getting the same laughs from CNN and MSNBC. Who are not trying to be funny! They are merely reading the news!
“Hey, did you see Wolf Blitzer last night? He killed!” I didn’t make up the title of this blog. I saw it on TV. Which late night show? None of them. It was a pundit on CNN, Ana Navarro, who said it.
I’m here through Thursday. Try the veal!
Comedy-and-news-are-becoming-one.
That’s not what’s really worrying me. What happens when they separate? When comedy and news split and become two separate things? What happens when the news isn’t funny anymore?
Our current clown show reality has a shelf life. It can’t go on forever. It will just seem like forever.
What happens after a sane, boring President is elected — and there are no more daily scandals, screw-ups, and shit-storms? No more crazy tweets? No more porn stars, playmates, plaintiffs, and guys named Pecker? The news will continue, but what about all the poor comedians, comedy writers, bloggers, and columnists? They will have to go back to writing jokes again.
They will be forced to think up funny stuff on their own! Our comedic muscles are atrophying! I can feel it. What can we do about it? Are there special comedic exercises? Should we fill in Mad Libs? Improv?
Sure, we could, but why bother? We can’t top reality. We can’t make this shit up.
When that time comes, we’ll all just have to buckle up and get back to work — making up jokes. When that time comes, I think I’ve got a good one.
Picture of Mr. Pecker not included.
A porn-star, a plaintiff, a playmate and a guy named Pecker walk into bar …
Not just another WordPress.com site, but an extraordinary place to spend a weekend, grill a cheese sandwich and watch a film to improve your life and stimulate a few of the grey cells.
A word about processing people pictures from parties. I use a lot of creative effects on people pictures because what I want to show is their faces, their laughter, the fun without making every look like they have the neck of a chicken or, as Garry puts it “the chrome dome.”
Everyone wants to look good. Most people our age don’t expect to look young and they don’t mind seeing character in their faces, but they also don’t want to look like they were just unearthed from a grave. Finding a balance is a bit of a trick. I put more time and energy into processing people — especially people in my age group — than I do for anything else.
Trees don’t care if the bark looks grungy, but people care a lot when their skin looks like tree bark.
It never crossed my mind that 50 years later, we’d be fighting the same battles again. I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as happy had a realized that nothing is permanent. No legislation is forever.
