Last week I was on Interstate 540 heading to work. One near experience on the road is plenty, but the teleporter is in the shop. There’s slow traffic ahead. I signal, check the mirror then ease into the left lane, just like I do 249 other times a year — oh, 237, counting furlough days. I felt more than heard a vibration. In my mirror I saw a car scoot onto the left shoulder then back on the lane. It evidently had been in my blind spot for  some time. He didn’t honk, when he passed later he did not gesture at me. A close one.

Think of all the other close calls that must happen constantly but are impossible to perceive.

Most people I know call this God, grace of God, divine intervention. One of my Fort Smith school buddies had parents able and willing to buy him a new sports car when he got his license at 16. He always was incredibly reckless, peeling out on motorbikes, waterskiing across boat wakes on Lake Tenkiller, whatever. He drove the red T-top Corvette like news photographers I later knew. Sure he got tickets, but he never wrecked. Now he has a great job in another state, still married to his high school sweetheart, kids etc. Back then he always told me he had a “guardian angel.”

The only miracle is that more of us don’t die younger. It’s federal car, highway and air safety regulations, sure, but all that amazes me is how rarely we get run over when we cross tricky streets. Cancer in young adults is tragic and terrifying precisely because it actually is unusual.

My Beloved and I didn’t know about the rain until we awoke to the forecast Monday morning on KUAF, our NPR station, 40-60 percent. I checked the bedroom window then hustled Mani the Tibetan terrier downstairs and out the back door, for his first outing of the day. (The fewer times we towel-dry the shaggy 2-year-old the happier we all are.)

It just began sprinkling. I saw that we had left out a patio table and two chairs so I folded them up and leaned them by the door rather than head first into the grass. I then turned toward the yard, felt a sharp gust of wind. A shower of sparks floated down onto the lawn just ahead of one end of a pole-to-pole electric wire. We were told later that a small branch behind the house next door had snapped and fallen onto the wires.

The sparks popped, and Mani looked at me barking. He knew to run away from that but all he saw was the wall of the house. I turned for the door, shouted his name and he ran in with me. MB was upstairs screaming, she saw the wire and sparking but not us.

Pup and me were feet from wet ground and a hot wire. I had thought about taking up the furniture after we found the best tree for Mani’s raised leg.

Swepco came within a half-hour. Took the crew three hours to put up a new line. You bet I’ve prayed my thanks many times since. But it can’t be a miracle.

We of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette dived into the cake. It must have come from Community Bakery or Silvek’s, as it was exquisite, a token from the gas company or the electric company. The reason was the pending (first) inauguration of native son Bill Clinton. Eventually all that was left was the cardboard base and the plastic columns. The cleaner of the last looked like good souvenirs to Gary and me, and I took four.

I was international editor (wire services wrangler) at the time, Gary a features page designer, and we had adjoining desks. A few months earlier publication of my weekly humor column Mirthology ended, again, and I openly pined for it.

The Standing Column, with black ribbon to honor the memory of Gary Golden

One of us, I honestly don’t remember, stacked two of the White House cake columns, dropped a pencil down the middle for stability, and stood it on a corner of my desk.

“Now you’ll always have a standing column,” Gary said. And often during my remaining six years in the Little Rock newsroom, Gary would return to his desk from lunch, a cigarette break (I may be mistaken but I think he smoked at the time), or to refill his coffee mug, and joke about it.

To this day, one of the stacked columns remains on my home desk (pictured), and the other stands at work. Even when I had another column (early 1999 to a downsize in late 2001) at another newspaper, I stood the columns prominently. You never knew.

Gary was a great work mate, there, throughout the 1990s. He commuted nearly an hour from Hot Springs. A single dad, he didn’t want to disrupt the friendships and schooling of his son, to whom he was devoted. He had a great, wry humor, as the best newsies do, and we vented workplace frustrations to each other, likely keeping us out of real trouble. And one or more times a day he’d disappear into the men’s room to prick his finger and check his glucose, as he had Type 1 diabetes. Friends tell me that it was complications of diabetes that took him.

The obituary mentioned his love of bicycling. There memory fails. I enjoy pedaling, too, so surely we must’ve talked of it. After all, I had biked to the newspaper in the years when I lived within blocks of it, while Gary drove that 45 miles.

Desk mates talk a lot but when situations change, people move on. I left Little Rock in early 1998. Gary and I next spoke a few minutes a week in 2003, when I first went to work in the Demzette’s Northwest Edition, some 150 miles away in Springdale, proofreading for a few months the society pages (called the Profiles section) that Gary put together in Little Rock. Our joky conversation picked up where it left off five years earlier, though neither of us had much time for anything deep.

Last year Gary was among the number downsized in the Little Rock newsroom. I saw his name and shuddered. But there were many names of people I knew, some as well as I did him, and hurt for them all, then wondered as I still do, when my time to leave the business will be.

Now it’s about seven years since Gary and I last communicated. And that’s just the beginning.

Puny gesture, but what can one do but hold high a half-full mug of newsroom coffee, already stale from being forgotten on a corner of one’s desk, near the now-chipped but still standing column, and toast a good fellow, Gary.

Seeing the backstage drama Crazy Heart down at the Malco on its opening weekend here in Northwest Arkansas gave me lots to think about, being a good movie.

It’d be fine to wait for a home viewing, but leisurely, panoramic views of New Mexico increase the worth of a cineplex screen (Houston’s skyline? Big deal).

The featured country & Western music was more Western than country. The plot though overrides that. It’s the old “star performer on the way down may be redeemed by the love of a good woman.” Last year’s middle-aged male star vehicle The Wrestler was another verse of the song. Both beg the question of what the female lead, who’s always much younger and beautiful, ever sees in these guys — in both flicks we should be grateful technology is not pursuing Smell-O-Vision.

There’s a certain reality to this hoary fictional device: artists who hit success early tend to coast later on. Perhaps it’s laziness, or burnout, or that their audience demands more of the same. It may not be alcoholism or other addictions.

Insight: If you’re coasting, you’re by definition coasting downhill.

The protagonists of both these movies recognize and love good women, whatever role groupies play. This brought to mind a recent column of Little Rock colleague Gene Lyons, writing in Salon.com about Tiger Woods, a golfer at the peak of his games. Gene writes, “At the expense of repeating myself, I first formulated Eugene’s First Law of Sexual Dynamics covering a pro bass fishing tournament in Tennessee:

‘If there’s something one man can do better than another, there’s a woman who’ll sleep with him for it.’”

Part of Gene’s argument is where there’s consent there’s often complicity. But not always. That makes not just for attractive fiction (for artists) but career-costing facts (for other public figures).

There’s more to solid movies than relationships. Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart uses the greatest subtlety to show how his character Bad Blake inflated into his on-stage confident self. As does Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. That made me think of Myrna Loy.

Got you?

The actress, whose best roles were in mid-20th century movies, would not have occurred to me but for a column just out by Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal. The drama and culture critic was discussing a 1952 recording of a staged reading of George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell,” a 90-minute section of his play Man and Superman. It now is available as a download. Teachout explains this was a project of the character actor Charles Laughton, who traveled the country in this show, also starring Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead.

Though this was before either Teachout or I were born, this production had legs. I saw Myrna Loy doing what must have been Moorehead’s part when I was a teen-ager in Arkansas in about 1973. “Don Juan in Hell” was a touring production that made a stop at the Fort Smith Municipal Auditorium.

Her main co-star was Ricardo Montalban (before TV’s Fantasy Island), whose autograph I still have somewhere, “To Ben, mi amigo …” and the others were Edward Mulhare (TV’s Ghost and Mrs. Muir) and Kurt Kasznar (TV’s Land of the Giants).

My life’s one stint as a “limo” driver was that night.

My dad for years volunteered as the booking agent for the Fort Smith Broadway Theater League. He also worked, as a part-time job, as stage manager for all shows that came through. Although he never used his position for any personal or family advantage, just this once he decided that with my very fresh driver’s license I should drive the stars in the family’s Pontiac from the Holiday Inn six blocks to the theater.

The men went first, as an apparent courtesy so on the next trip Miss Loy would have the car to herself. I recall wondering why Mr. Montalban didn’t also warrant a separate ride. But the other guys did insist he take the front seat. I was nervous; Mr. Montalban with kind words put me at ease. (Dad already was at the auditorium. Mom, not wanting to miss a thing, rode in the back seat.)

Then I saw the basis of the chivalry. Miss Loy walked with two canes, very slowly. By the Internet Movie Database I now see that she was not particularly old, about 68. But she no longer was the sexy, quick-witted babe Nora Charles.

She was dignified and quiet. Still, to a 16-year-old, an old lady. Until she took the stage.

Dramatic readings have no props, sets or costumes. Stools, maybe music stands to hold scripts. The cast took the stage one at a time in formal wear, which must have been waiting in their dressing rooms, because they sure weren’t wearing tuxes and such in the blue LeMans.

Last came Myrna Loy. She strode in, wearing a brilliant gown, to cheers. No canes, no halting gait. Head high and smiling like the movie star she was.

The show? Hardly remember it. What I do recall is Dad telling me about Shaw –  My Fair Lady came from his Pygmalion, that he was so cool his name became an adjective, “Shavian,” and that it wasn’t pronounced Ber NARD but accented on the first syllable, BER nu’d.

Her exit, then returns for curtain calls, had the same gallant stride. Bridges and Rourke whose characters also had physical problems, albeit self-inflicted, nailed that entering and leaving one’s stage persona.

Afterward people lined up outside Miss Loy’s dressing room. I watched; maybe I was waiting to take everyone back to the Holiday. The fans did not necessarily ask for autographs. Most just wanted to thank her for this or that movie that meant so much to them. She sat patiently as they walked past. They did not seem to notice the theater face was off. She looked tired but regal, a straight back under a dressy robe.

Next to the chair in the hallway rested those canes.

My relationship with money sometimes irritates people. It would be none of their business of course, except when it comes up in conversation. I’m one who avoids specifics, but I try to be supportive of stuff that people say casually. Yet every once in a while I bite my tongue when people talk about what things ought to be worth or how much their collectibles will bring, should they sell them.

History and literature are full of stories of people exchanging a gold ring or an unset diamond, sewn into a coat hem, just for a meal. We forget than when we’re desperate, the people around us are, too. The worth of an object is what people offer when you want to sell it. Price tags in stores is rather new, and Western.

We must have been in junior high when my neighbor Dana and I were talking about the relative value of things. At that time, the early 1970s, Radio Shack sold remainder cassettes. It’s where I bought jazz tapes, to teach myself what happened after Big Band, which is what Dad still played. I had read about John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, and found tapes of them there. (Dana liked Newhart and Cosby comedy LPs.) So the cassettes there on Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith were a couple of bucks and buying new ones at Elmore’s (locally owned) or Madcats (a mall chain), three times that easily.

What struck us is how for the price of lunch for both of us at Sandy’s (which became Hardee’s) you could buy cut-outs. With care, albums could last forever. The burgers, fries and shakes last until dinner time. I still don’t understand why a hot meal costs the same as a 44-minute tape, but one incident as an adult helped.

Some 15 years later, in about 1988, I decided to sell my dad’s coin collection. This was not the plastic-mounted set of a collector. We’re talking about a shoebox full of mainly buffalo nickels.

From the late 1940s to 1967 when bankruptcy was declared, my dad managed a dry cleaners owned by his big brother. After ‘67, Uncle Al retired, and Dad took a series of jobs including office manager, Realtor and income tax preparer. As part of the Model Laundry & Dry Cleaners of Fort Smith, Dad and Uncle Al owned two coin-operated washaterias. When Dad saw an interesting coin while emptying the machines he pocketed it and put in a newer one in its place. A shoebox full of these was in his desk, and Mom gave it to me after he died in 1985, at age 69 of emphysema from smoking.

After a while, I decided to sell most of them, for practical and emotional reasons. If Dad had no sentiment for them, why should I? I did the homework and didn’t just go to one of those people who set up in hotels with ads in the paper for Cash for Gold or Collectibles. I made an appointment with a legitimate coin dealer in downtown Little Rock, near my newsroom. I first cleaned the coins in a sink of suds.

The manager looked at each coin, quickly and with an obviously practiced eye. He confirmed that the condition of the coin makes all the difference, and these nickels — this was long before you had to feed all those quarters at Laundromats — had long been circulated (1938 was the buffalo’s last year). A few, however, were decent, and were worth — get this — five times their face value.

Five times their face value. That’s right, 25 cents for each 5-cent piece.

The rest, the dealer said, were worth double. Double! If I agreed to the sale, he would toss my worn coins in a bucket he kept for children getting started in coin collecting.

The rest he offered me what I have estimated at $34.70. If there were 300 nickels, then 270 were worth double their value, $27, and 30 times five, or $7.50.

I could have kept the box. Maybe the smoother coins now could get four times their price and the sharper ones 10 times. Still not even $100.

Ever since, when someone says their  300 $5 Beanie Babies are each worth $40 on eBay because they never took the stuffed critters out of the packaging, well, I just think they’ve got their first mortgage payment, 359 to go.

The box of nickels logic applies to everything. Winning a lottery? My friend Don McNay has advice for you. If you sell your house for cash, you’ve bought yourself two or four years of income, if managed well. Then what?

Besides relative worth, the shoebox’s main lesson turned out to be the value of work. A job with its regular paychecks is what pays for stuff more than some one-time windfall, or even 20 jackpots. If I finish a novel and sell it to Hollywood, I’ll revise this core belief.

The dealer back in 1988 did point out two coins, one a like-new old nickel and a Nazi Germany coin. The latter wasn’t worth much, but for historical value I kept it and the one great nickel. Ten bucks for both; call me.

Identity is a flummox. Sometimes it feels like you spend a lifetime — or the lifetime thus far — pursuing an identity, but your identity may not be you. I’ve heard of two senior or retired professors who said they chose their doctoral fields rather arbitrarily and lost interest as the years rolled by but there they were. Not an economist, not a historian?

That’s on the side of identity as what others know you by, perhaps not what you feel you are. It can be close, but by being close, isn’t it at all. Not a game of horseshoes.

Flummox, above, has its own identity problem. It looks right, but flummox is a verb, despite sitting in the predicate’s seat, a nounship, which is not a word.

Garrison Keillor is recovering from a mild stroke, and yoga the other day gave me a neck ache. I’ll nearly fine, thanks to stretching and walking in the days since. Nothing compared to a cerebral misfire. Garrison no matter how mild last Sunday’s stroke is reported to have been, still has been handed a bomb. Mild means he should recover 100 percent or close to it, vital in his identity as performer. In his guise of writer, he could work despite some disabilities. He left the hospital Friday. As a Minnesotan, his neighborhood infirmary is the Mayo Clinic.

Hold the mustard. What is Garrison Keillor, showman, penman or something else?

I am a writer. But if I was born in 1907 rather than 1957, I’d be writing letters like I post e-mails. Everybody wrote letters then, and that didn’t make them Writers. People were whatever else they were. If they scribbled a sonnet on the day of their marriage or the birth of a grandchild, it was because in school they learned iambic pentameter and abab cdcd efef gg. They remained farmers or preachers or seamstresses.

I have two incomplete novels in this computer. I’d rather not call myself a novelist. I’d hate for anyone to read them, for fear they’d agree I’m not. The few poems I’ve squibbed aren’t bad, but I won’t call myself a poet because it’s not the first medium I choose. My instinct propels me to the personal essay, a genre defined in the 16th century by Montaigne. Or columns. Or a blog like Brick.

I am an editor. A few non-journalism jobs here and there, but editing has paid the bills and health insurance premiums. All kinds: Copy editor, city editor, wire editor, editorial page editor, page designer, radio news producer. I’m proud of this, but I don’t see that near the top of my obit.

For some 19 years I have been a baker. Candlestick maker has never appealed and, as a vegetarian, butcher is out. One year, I ran a bed-and-breakfast, so making muffins was half the job and making beds the other half? Actually, they were quarters, as 50 percent of my labor was in the adjoining gift shop. I bake for home.

If I believed in “branding,” the current self-marketing scheme, it’d have to be as writer, editor or baker.

I know a guy who’s listed as a producer. Earlier this summer I saw an honest-to-God movie that he’s produced, with some famous actors. According to the local paper from last Sunday, his day job is running a video and book distributing business. His wife has released two novels, and she’s told me she’s a novelist. She’s also known as a screenwriter and actress.

“Branding” as a freelancer? No, babe; we’re self-syndicated now.

Mr. Keillor — get well soon, sir — at one point liked to call himself the “world’s tallest radio comedian.” (The joke is, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”) But it now is revealed he’s 67, too young for a stroke but high time for his body to be saying, “hey, go easy on the salty snacks.”

As a fairly young adult, Mr. Keillor was getting published in the hot-damn New Yorker, casuals (humor essays) and short fiction. He writes novels. He wrote and starred in a major motion picture. His variety show Prairie Home Companion, even though it’s now partly written by others, remains a marathon of scripts, improvisation and performance, from skits to his masterful 10-20-minute monologues on Lake Wobegon. He’s even a columnist. I read him weekly, hear most of his radio show on weekends. I saw it live in Hot Springs in 2004.

What is Garrison Keillor, whose talents and productivity are so admirable?

I have friends who are successful writers, who call themselves that but with humility. Other writers in town have no humbleness but their matter-of-fact comfort is as guileless as the guy who rings your doorbell and announces he’s the plumber. A watercolorist friend is the same. Then, those artists who proclaim their gift, job or avocation sometimes are darned talented.

Maybe any labeling makes me uncomfortable.

In high school in Fort Smith, I wasn’t the smartest guy, I was 20-something from the top grade-point average. Yet some called me “smartest.” I preferred “non-conformist.” Then I enrolled into the university of non-conformity, Stanford. I learned that in a teeming pool of non-conformists, the term loses meaning as fast as mud washed off by a hose.

Years after graduating, alumni publications show nonconformity as stage of adolescence. We followed our parents into families, jobs, thickening waists and graying hair. None of us is saving the world. Only a few acted on their undergraduate talent: Dave Lang, Bruce Handy, David Henry Hwang, who wouldn’t remember me, come to mind.

Yet while in college, when classmates learned I was in the Stanford Band, they’d often say, “that figures, you being a cut-up.” That irked me. Band didn’t make me a smart-aleck. I joined the band because I was a wiseacre.

I prefer, apparently, not being held to one identity, even if it’s an identity I covet.

I suspect Mr. Keillor if pinned down would call himself a writer, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of fellow who’d want to be limited. He even sings agreeably.

Carrying a tune, now that’s something to be known by.

A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And no one can talk to a horse of course
That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed.
Go right to the source and ask the horse
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse.
He’s always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister Ed.
People yakkity yak a streak and waste your time of day
But Mr. Ed will never speak unless he has something to say
A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And this one’ll talk ’til his voice is hoarse.
You never heard of a talking horse?
Well listen to this:
“I’m Mister Ed.”

By Ray Evans and Jay Livingston

The Internet is not killing the newspaper. The economy is.

This would be obvious as it’s stated in every halfway decent article on the print media, but the copy usually includes comments by people who seem to throw their hands out and cry, “Ach, die Web” (Japanese for “OMG, did U C that post on FacebookTwitterCNNdotCom?”). Thus increasingly when I’m at the barber, the park or the bookshop acquaintances ask if I have been laid off yet, then with sympathy they blame those durn computers. These two-minute chats are never the time to really explain, so I’d like to argue in Brick the ‘net plays a secondary role in today’s implosion of newspapers.

First, while this is a subject that fascinates news junkies and naturally my colleagues, others who want to think about the economy would be better off considering the auto industry, housing and banking. Their slow-mo collapse — it’s far from over — can ruin all of us. Heaping newspapers into society’s recycling bin doesn’t hold a pencil to these: We journalists sooner or later may find ourselves laid off, go on the dole for a while then get another job in another trade. Meanwhile, news that deserves distribution will sooner or later find a way to reach those who want the information. That is my optimistic conclusion: Newspapers won’t die, with or without us Watergate-inspired J-major boomers.

A few weeks ago, on the first warm Saturday — just before the month of rain — My Beloved and I stopped by a Lowe’s home improvement store. Its nursery was full of transplants still healthy as they hadn’t yet been neglected to wilting by clerks. The wing indeed the whole store was as empty of customers as the displays were full of tomato seedlings. Any previous season opener it would have been elbow-to-elbow, despite the fact that within two weeks there’d be another couple of frosts to kill anything you set out.

This wasn’t the only desolate place. Restaurants where we normally have to wait just a little (we don’t patronize places that are too busy; life is too short) have open tables even at high traffic hours. See the same number of people holding bags of fresh purchases at the mall as last season?

Whoa, baby, is that all?

These are among the places that advertise. To ease their budgets, they’re buying fewer ads or smaller ads or black-and-white not color ads, or they’re getting display ads and not glossy supplements. And so on. This leads to newspapers cutting pages, then cutting staff. Personnel comprises newspapers’ biggest capital outlay, Advertising takes care of payroll and profit to the owners. The piddly amount you pay monthly for home delivery — or the single copy you grab at the convenience store — basically pays for the ink and paper, and trucks and circulation crews. When the loud person says, “Such-and-such was on the front page just to sell newspapers,” do the math: A bad wreck or a just-caught politician would sell what, another 5,000 50-cent papers more than usual (a big number for my size city)? Whoa, baby, we made another $2,500. That figure won’t even get you all that big of an ad.

The Internet is a swarm of gnats for newspapers. They keep coming despite all the swatting, and they’re drawing blood but only at the ankles. Yes the Internet draws readers away, but in the generation before this one, 24/7 cable news channels comprised an earlier generation of biting gnats. There’s more rivals for Americans’ attention. If you have the newspaper addiction, thank you, but you can name old classmates who never picked up the habit of getting the daily paper from the driveway or doorstep as their parents and grandparents did.

The right thing to do in a hyperlinked essay is to point the reader to all the proof-texts about ad revenue and the history of circulation declines. Scan through Editor and Publisher. TV’s tanking, too, so channel-surf at Broadcasting & Cable.

Despite the domino effect of the overall economy slamming stores with the retailers cutting marketing costs before going after salesclerks and inventory, the return of advertising will provoke the return of print media. But it’s going to have to target a different audience. Media managers who hit the permanently smaller audience will make it, and those who either work to regain the old numbers or those who try to expand the 21st century audience where it won’t go will fail.

The Golden Rule of business

This conclusion comes from direct Golden Rule-based observation: I don’t click on Internet ads. Do you? Of course advertisers know this; that’s why ‘net ads are so cheap. They don’t work well. Print ads magically work better for some needs in some circumstances.

Unlike most journalists I have bought advertising as a small businessman. You need faith, remembering the Golden Rule, to buy ads.

The four partners who in 1998 owned Beaver Town Inn & Trading Post directed me to research advertising and buy just a little. I bought small display ads in the regional Active Years, now AY magazine, and the weekly What’s Up entertainment section of the local Demzette. Tom from the newspaper was up front, saying you can’t measure the success of ads you buy. It’s wholly impractical to ask customers why they came in that day, and it’s highly likely they couldn’t tell you why with any reliability, either. What seems to happen is your ad appears enough times that something strikes a bell and people come to your business or they happen to be driving buy and unconsciously Beaver Trading Post rings a bell, perhaps caused by the ad. That’s the faith: With halfway decent advertising, appropriately placed, and run often enough, store and inn sales go up. The young gal from the monthly just talked fast and smiled a lot with a heavily lipsticked mouth, yet I bought from her because I knew how deep the magazine penetrated our target.

The Golden Rule drives you to include advertising in your budget unless the economy is tanking, when you must pare anything not absolutely necessary, based on the habits of you and people you know. The rule directs you to recall ads moving you to check out some business that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.

Thus, back to Square One. But Square One has been hacked at the corners by the Good Depression (the Great Depression was suffered by the Greatest Generation, and at best we’re just a Good Generation). The Depression is shrinking all (imagine that, all) newspapers, some to zero. The Internet is changing newspapers.

Time for lonely tumbleweeds

Our Good Depression is laying waste to any number of industries. Outside of the jobs we have and those of people we know, we sense the Depression most in retail because that’s how all of us get stuff we use. It’s hard to feel sorry for journalism when thousands of new car dealers, the flamboyant guys who’ve been in town since your dad was a teenager, are being shut out by automakers. In a few months, a number of the showrooms with all the pennants and noisy commercials are going to be striped asphalt deserts. Cue the tumbleweed wrangler.

But I’m writing about my segment of the economy. You just can’t say that 35 years of minuscule but accumulating circulation drops suddenly causes the newspapers in Detroit to cut from seven days a week to three. The shift comes from the main revenue source, ads. Stores don’t buy ads when it’s all they can do to keep the lights on.

Yet a down economy is precisely the reason for optimism for newspapers. The economy is cyclical. Not spring up boing-boing, but in the two-steps-forward-three-steps back manner that alternates with three-steps-forward-two-steps back. Those two dance steps also comprise how my life works.

As the economy stabilizes, people will want to buy the things they had been delaying and stores will want to tell them what they’ve got, by print, broadcast, the Web, coupons, billboards and costumed characters dancing on sidewalks.

Yes, I see a rosy picture, but it calls for pragmatism. Readers will be different and stay that way, and fewer of them, and stay that way. Unless there’s a calamity. By definition calamities are very rare.

Those newspapers that survive will have to admit the readers they get are just about all they’re getting, and not dwell either on how circulation used to be or on ways to bring back the old demographics. Short of longterm national tragedy where information is vital to literally survive, young readers aren’t coming back, until they get older and hunting for something to read.

Wall Street is Main Street

The emphasis by some papers on local local local will only drive educated young adults and their wallets away. National, world and business news must be emphasized as well. Some street widening has only momentary interest, even if it’s on their commute, as does the graffiti at the junior high, even if it’s their kid’s school. Our military’s presence in the world’s hot spots actually is local, as far as that person who went to college with someone whose kid was. … Wall Street is Main Street, when it comes to your rent or mortgage and the policy changes your credit card company sends you more frequently.

The solution, and there is a solution, is for newspapers to analyze their audience, not the audience they once had or could have if they tweak something, but the audience that right now is hanging on. And convey to them advertising that’s appropriate. Retailers will help papers with this. It will make for smaller newspapers, available both on paper and online like now. Advertising will pay for nearly all of the business, as before.

The consumer likely will not pay extra for routine news online. In the event of calamity, the reader just might fork it over for a while. The few publications who’ve long been charging for online access — there haven’t been many — should do fine, because they’ve set their standard among their current and potential readership. The rest may make matters worse levying the two kinds of fees proposed: Register with a credit card for an annual fee, or micropayments where one debits for each article. It’s not so much that people expect online news to be free but that they feel they already are paying for it — the DSL or cable bill. That revenue is not going to the producers of the news, but to the consumer it’s still money out for that purpose and, what do you know, roughly the same as a newspaper or magazine subscription.

Prying the paper from cold dead fingers

In other words: If news is overpriced, only pundits will read it. Not that different from the original, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

This has been proven. A couple of years ago The New York Times ended the wall it set where one had to pay to read its acclaimed columnists. It didn’t work. One reason is if you needed to hear what Tom Friedman or Maureen Dowd had to say, you could get it elsewhere. As The Onion parody news source put it early this month: “Between Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, half of America gets The New York Times read to them for free every day.”

Newspapers have cost the reader next-to-nothing since before the Civil War: The Penny Press undercut the going price of a newspaper in 1833, 6 cents. The federal inflation calculator only goes back to 1913. It states that what cost 6 cents in 1913 costs $1.29 now and a penny in 1913 translates to 22 cents now. Estimate back 80 more years and when you see a newspaper at EZ Mart at 50 cents daily and 2 bucks Sunday you know that the charge remains “blow your nose” money.

Newspapers will adapt to a world where the Internet is a fixture in much the same way as it adapted to each new media technology of AM radio then broadcast TV then FM radio then cable TV — most of which seems free or nearly free. Newspaper managers will get this when the economy bounces up and advertising bounces back. If I’m facing a new job as overnight baker at Panera, then it can’t come too soon.

I walked over to ask for directions. Their camp was just within sight, and my wife could barely see it in the fading light of dusk. The group comprised a couple of women and four men of varying ages. The elder of the group was obvious. He was mature, with an authority about him, but he was not old and gray at all. By complexion and hair, they seemed Persian/Iranian, but the setting was middle European, hilly green forest.

He was the only one to speak to me, and the directions he gave were clear. Yet he insisted I sit and be welcome, just for a few minutes. While these people weren’t cuddly sit-on-the-porch Southerners, they were sincere and we made amiable small talk.

Time was slipping away, though, so I stood to leave. My wife was there in our car, at the crest of that hill, I again pointed out. The lush setting could have been one of the locales of Anthony Bourdain’s Travel Channel food-a-logue series No Reservations.

“Please, eat with us. Wave to your wife to join us. We don’t have strangers come by often. We would enjoy the company,” the elder said.

As politely as I could, I declined. He wouldn’t hear of it. We then engaged in that sort of uncomfortable yet friendly banter where two men argue over treating the other to a restaurant meal.

“I’ll slaughter a lamb. We’ll have a feast,” which he thought would move me to stay. Tethered nearby were two lambs. I sure didn’t want them to go to that trouble, the hours it would take, not to mention we’re vegetarian.

Wasn’t I being as helpful to them as well as to myself? Across the world, regular people created feasts with meat only for holidays or to welcome strangers. I was a stranger, yes, but not that kind. They should do as they would have done if we kept driving.

My host listened with quiet amusement and walked over to untie one of the lambs.

“I get it,” I said. “You have to welcome the stranger. It’s tradition. It’s religion. I might be an angel, rewarding your generosity or punishing your selfishness. It’s a basic parable, in the origins of Judaism and Christianity and Islam. Not to mention Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. I assure you, I am just a traveler. Your offer counts just as much as our coming to sit at your picnic table. I’m fine.”

The clan elder produced a knife almost as big as a machete. He held the lamb at the neck. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “We have another lamb for later.”

“Wait!” I said. “Eat as you choose, but I am leaving now, regardless. Thanks for the road directions.”

The man slit the animal’s throat. I turned away quickly enough to not see the act but returned. The ground was bloody. The lamb was quiet, unexpectedly peaceful while drawing its last breaths. More surprising, the tethered remaining lamb was calm, oblivious to the demise of the first.

Nauseous and angry, I stalked back to our car, sure my wife could not see what happened from her vantage.

Skimming over the details, I told her what happened. The directions indicated we only had a short drive left before our destination, where we were to stop for the night. Hungry, she wanted to hang out there a little longer, to eat the egg salad sandwiches we had made that morning.

As we cleaned crumbs off the car seats, the elder walked up. He carried a chunk of well-cooked meat, so tender it was falling off the bone. I wondered at how the hours had passed for this to have come about.

His eyes insisted. So I ate some of the lamb.

Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock

]]> http://benpollock.com/brick/2009/04/15/it-had-to-be-ewe/feed/ 0 http://benpollock.com/brick/2009/03/20/row-your-boat-ashore/ http://benpollock.com/brick/2009/03/20/row-your-boat-ashore/#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:29:10 +0000 Ben http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=1037

I’m vacationing in Lebanon, using this time to get up to speed on Facebook. How’s Arkansas treating you? Let me know when you can. Bye, Michael”

This came last August. I had just joined Facebook as well. After seven months, I figured out a reply.

I delayed writing for two reasons. One, Michael, is because you always ask these questions. Anyone else, and the answer can be, “Arkansas has been great.” But at college you with that warm, interested gaze intended your questions to be considered thoughtfully with a superficial answer being almost an insult to you.

The other reason I realized this week was envy. Yes, one of the seven deadlies.

One of the great things about Facebook is its ability to find people. Michael was a good friend at Stanford from sophomore year through graduation, when we lost contact.

Michael is intensely brilliant and in college studied Portuguese so he could work at a multinational corporation in Brazil. I don’t know how far he got in that early plan, only that he now is a respected professor in Britain. I guess anyone would be impressed, not just me.

My first memory of him is of an early conversation with him asking, “Ben, what is it like to grow up in Arkansas?” and I replied that with no neutral basis of comparison, no reliable answer is possible. Michael insisted, kindly and with no hint of patronizing, that he really wanted to know. I tried to tell him. In later visits we’d piece together more. He told me of Connecticut and well-to-do neighbors and how his father was a top executive at a major food corporation. I tried to describe Fort Smith, its school system, the variety of childhood friends, and how and where I flourished and flailed. He got as much of that as I did about him Back East. If he visualized (in hindsight) Sling Blade, then I imagined The Ice Storm.

Michael could talk about the potential of multinationals and I about reporting and editing at The Stanford Daily, and it was par. The envy would be that Michael really could land a job in Brazil while my chance for an entry-level job at The Washington Post was pretty laughable.

The thing about envy — and the other cardinals as well — is their possibility. For most of the 10 Commandments, effort is needed, say to murder or steal. For any of the Seven Deadlies all a person has to do is exist. You don’t envy things that are impossible, just the things you could do, at least theoretically. I could have angled for a career in high business, one with an exotic flair. That puts things in perspective: I would not want that life. But switching to business and finding internships and mentors in finance or management, yeah, could’ve.

The Seven Deadlies are not sins except when in excess. Every one drives us into being better people.

• Envy: Fascination with what the other fellow has sharpens your own goals: What do you really want?
• Greed: I must have fast Internet access, a cell phone and cable TV. There’s a lot of other things that’d be nice to own. Not even the “must’s” are needed, but any of which get me to work, almost on time, every day.
• Wrath: Knowing what you dislike is just as important as naming what you like. Acting on it turns anger to useful energy. Letting wrath fester, well that is a sin.
• Pride: Without gaining skills then acknowledging with some glee that yes you can, you won’t.
• Gluttony: Why not finish the bag of chips? It’s a weekly treat, not a daily fix. The downside to satiety is boredom, not to mention debt.
• Sloth: Know when to knock off for the night and that some days have more energy than others. The other six deadlies usually keep sloth from taking over.
• Lust: Venturing out amid the beauty of the world gives one reasons to bathe and not slouch, to listen and not assume, to make the most of life with one’s mate.

If Michael and I were to talk now, we’d quickly learn of one another’s triumphs but also tragedies or just setbacks and shocks. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he might have envied me then. What would he have fancied? I likely had more fun day in and out on campus than he, though we both were nerds.

How’s Arkansas treating me? Michael, it’s been great. Can’t speak for the future, but it has been what I thought I wanted and seemed to have needed. You should visit. It will be what you expect along with some unexpected disappointments but with many more features that will surprise you, with a touch of envy.

Your friend,
Ben

The news business is collapsing. Lots of other industries are imploding — banking, autos — but who can do without loans and cars, while who needs news in this time of peace (yes, it is)?

I. News Always Has Been Free, Almost

The explanation given is that the Internet is free. If people believe that, it’s no surprise that individuals are going broke nearly as fast as corporations. They’re all idiots. The “free” Internet is paid for with a monthly phone or cable bill. If you bring your laptop to a wired coffee shop, you pay for it with overpriced caffeine. If you check e-mail at the library, then taxes are paying for it. Sure that’s not much money, but there it is. At the cheapest, the home connection is about $1 a day. The amount hasn’t changed much — though response gotten pleasantly faster — in years.

I got a bill from my newspaper the other day (by mistake) and got out a calculator. Subscribing for seven days a week costs 30 cents to 34 cents per, depending on the choice of a quarterly or annual agreement. That’s Blow Your Nose Money, especially when compared to the other bits you blow bucks for in the course of a work week. Buying a newspaper off a stand moves the daily price closer to that of the Internet. That dollar a day for the Web is nothin’, either, unless you’re really, really hurting. As the Good Depression moves in, that day may be coming for the rest of us.

I long have held a conclusion about what will save the news business but have kept quiet. Explaining it would be roundabout. Then the area’s huge ice storm gave me an “aha” moment, making the route less circuitous though long.

II. The Burger Crowd

We, My Beloved and I, met with a restaurateur when we first settled in the Eureka Springs area in early 1998, to manage for a year a bed-and-breakfast with gift shop owned by four Arkansas businessmen. The guy was a stranger but from Fort Smith and we had people in common. I was looking for advice.

From him we learned some background on Eureka then, out of the blue, about turning tables. It was on his mind. If we were starting out a decade later we’d know the restaurant term, because the details of small business have been popular articles, to say nothing of “reality” shows. This man priced his meals higher than needed to prevent local old-timers and Passion Play tourists (as opposed to the artsy-spa tourists) from ordering the cheapest items on the menu — burgers — plus coffee or iced tea and camping a couple of hours. Three sets of diners could have been seated there in that span.

Yet who wants to be rushed when paying resort prices? Elsewhere in the country, Starbucks was expanding quickly and raking in great profit with the nearly the opposite concept, where people hang out for hours on an espresso drink, no free refills, conversing, reading or using computers.

MB and I came back to buy dinner from him a few weeks later, with another couple. To be nice. Maybe we should not have been surprised at the routine menu choices and their ordinary quality. If he wanted the sophisticated crowd, why the hunting-and-fishing motif and Holiday Inn fare? And his turned out to be a place, rare in Eureka, that had neither vegetarian entrees nor an accommodating chef so we did our country diner ordering dance: side-dish improv.

His place was out of the way for us, and we didn’t return, nor have MB and I ever seen or heard of him since. He was cynical to the point we wondered why he agreed to see us, but he was the one who kept the conversation going. So we remember the Burger Crowd lesson 11 years later, as we see some restaurants follow it to good success, while old-fashioned diners ignore it to stable income year in and out. We see Starbucks and its locally owned take-offs do well, even as we read that the chain has suffered great setbacks in the last year.

I think he was angry because his theory wasn’t working all that well. In truth though the Burger Crowd theory is applied everywhere still. It’s what sets Panera at a remove from Burger King and Martha Stewart above other Kmart products. Yes the quality is a couple of clicks better but is it worth the price difference? The Starbucks model does well in other circumstances. Many working theories besides these abound; it’s a matter of the proprietor making the appropriate assessment of all factors.

III. Blow Your Nose Money

Our year at the Beaver Town Inn & Trading Post gave us a lifetime of anecdotes, although MB and I aren’t the sort to share them often. “Burger Crowd” is the second, and this is the favorite. The Trading Post sold few gifts but a good share of cigarettes, snacks and beer. In Arkansas, the managers of any store that sells alcohol are compelled to go to a one-day “Beer School” in Little Rock for the permit. (People running on-premises consumption joints have their own hoops to run). The state Alcoholic Beverage Control ran the workshop. Its purpose was to teach the 20 of us that Saturday in 1998 what’s permitted and not, and the penalties of selling to minors and so forth.

The teacher was a staff lawyer in a suit and tie. After grading our exams at the end of the afternoon, he signed our certificates with a fat Montblanc fountain pen. His biggest lesson — in terms of time he spent on it — was that the penalties for violating nearly any provision were slight and affordable. Opening too early or staying open too late, selling booze on Sundays, could be met with a fine of $100 per each day that the violation occurred. Compared to what convenience stores can take in for beer sales (allowed only in certain areas of the state), $100 for an “oversight” here and there meant mere Blow Your Nose Money, he said.

The lawyer asked if we students thought $100 was a lot of money. All of us did. MB and I wore business casual — we’d be seeing friends later — still not the lawyer’s pinstripes, but all the other students looked downright grungy, not much wealth there. The lawyer focused on them.

“You and your honey go to the lake a lot of weekends, right? (Many nods in response.) Stay Friday night, maybe Saturday night, too? (Nods.) What’s a motel cost? How much you pay for lunch, for chips, for dinner, for your beers? You have a trailer, well OK, what are your payments? And the boat payments, buying ice? See, $100 is Blow Your Nose Money.”

The lawyer gave example after example like this of routine life for working-class families, interrupting himself often to check for reactions and shows of hands for How many do this or How many pay for that. He thus kept them involved, that he meant them.

I believe the teacher emphasized this as a way of throwing in a free lesson on business, to rethink money, and that he couldn’t fill six hours on just state regulations. In the 11 years since, both MB and I think $100 is a lot of money even when indexed for inflation, but we understand it’s Blow Your Nose Money too. Consumer Reports persuaded me to pay 94 cents at Wal-Mart for good toothpaste. When I am spending minutes squeezing the last of the goo on my brush, I remember, $1 is a hundredth of Blow Your Nose Money, so I grab a fresh tube from the cabinet and toss the spent one.

Blow Your Nose Money is a contradiction of the Great Depression generation mushing slivers of soap together to get a few more washes. As our Good Depression deepens (the Great Depression was suffered by the Greatest Generation, and at best we’re just a Good Generation), how penny-pinching will we become? Will it help?

The dollar-a-day Internet is a better value than the 30-cent delivered newspaper: You can check e-mail, view TV shows you missed, interact via Facebook, read Roger Ebert’s movie reviews, some people get to work remotely (away from the office) with it. Even if you invest in one of the few fee-based Web sites (I pay for The Wall Street Journal and Cooks Illustrated online), those are just pennies a day over that.

MB’s and my parents were children in the 1940s and ’30s. Well into their later years, they maintained nervous money-saving habits that could not have helped much then. But the principal is: Every bit helps.

Does it really?

IV. The Ice Age

MB and I will be sorting for a long time the lessons gained from the ice storm that began Monday, Jan. 26, 2009. The aha for me starts like this: My newspaper managed to show up on my doorstop every morning that week. On the first dawns, the carrier must’ve walked it up as we live on a steep lane, thickly coated with ice and littered by fallen oak and pine limbs.

My street had neither electricity nor land-line phone service. The various newspapers gave us storm tips and emergency phone numbers, as well as facts on the weather and the responses to it. Due to federal deregulation news-talk radio stations had sports call-ins and in the afternoon Rush Limbaugh. The storm cut the public radio station from the air. Until we decided to evacuate to a Bentonville motel and board our pets, we didn’t have TV, whose capsules when we got to see them proved always never quite enough.

In fall 2005 the New Orleans Times Picayune famously kept production during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, both online and print, the latter done miles away then returned by truck and boat. Until our ice storm that impressed me. Now, to what end? No power no Internet. A print edition can’t answer every question a storm victim will have about what’s going on and what to do about it, not when it’s also got to fit in all the other news, not to mention sports, comics and classifieds. Plus, it’s the latest — from yesterday afternoon.

I can’t convey the anguish of how badly I wanted information that icy week and how unavailable it was. Maybe it was just nervous compulsion, from years of conveniently checking e-mail, of glancing at The Weather Channel, of news.google and news.yahoo. I can’t say precisely what I wanted from the storm-edition newspapers except, more. In the drafty cold house, we had no TV, and why waste the radio’s batteries on not-much? Cell phones connected us to other people who knew no more than us. Ours is an older neighborhood with wide diversity of neighbors — we moved branches for one another and exchanged phone numbers like we should have done years ago — and they felt the isolation from information, too. We checked who had gas water heaters and wood stoves and generators, which are great while you have gallons of fuel around. We had lists of who left for motels and who toughed it out (“Hey, come home, your power’s back! No, ours is still out.”) It was a short-lived panic, as on the first afternoons I would walk and slide 3/4 of a mile to my car, parked at a supermarket, and drive to the newsroom. This was no Katrina.

The ice storm thus persuaded me — I already thought this — that an all-Internet newspaper won’t work as a news source in the full and likely variety of circumstances. But the journalism profession is heading that way because the print model is going broke.

V. World War Three Strikes and We’re Out?

With a track record of foolish predictions, allow me to state with certainty yet no authority or proof what’s going to happen to the news business. It’s kind-of going to repeat history, or repeat myth, that of the Spanish-American War. The news business — and local and network or cable television news have similar economic problems — will be free-falling for a few years, even spinning out, until something bad happens. Real bad, worse than 9/11.

The New York newspapers were invaluable in the weeks after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but various Web sites were a great source of information and comfort to everyone, too, as was TV and NPR and bloggers for that matter. But that faded fairly quickly into the economic meltdown that was just beginning then.

News will come back when people really need it. The Good Depression won’t be enough. No one’s ever said the Great Depression caused a jump in revenue. Today there is no increase in circulation or ratings attributable to people wanting to understand the Obama Stimulus Plan. There won’t be. The worsening economy won’t be enough to bring either newspapers or online news vehicles into prominence. People now are getting all the information they want about job retraining and avoiding scams, never mind what more they need to know. It’s not enough to worry about shelter and food; we’re going to have to be worried about our lives before we demand to know the whole story, the real story as far as professional journalists can dig in and figure it out, day in and day out, to bring the news media back.

With large, tangible threats to ourselves and our country, people will demand knowledge, including gory photos and revelations of deceit from leaders we had admired. Actually, threats won’t be enough.

We don’t need a third world war. A full-fledged one-on-one war will save the news media. Iraq and Afghanistan are not out-and-out wars, sorry. We are not being threatened, personally, politically or geographically, the troops are not drafted, and we can leave Baghdad or Kabul at any time. Yes, we need to withdraw carefully, but that’s up to us. In an out-and-out war, the enemy will have a say on when it stops.

Don’t want war? OK. A terrorist attack with a handheld nuclear weapon, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans immediately and with radiation spreading for months. (Fewer than 3,000 people died on 9/11.) That’ll do. That’s when the Web won’t be enough, and print editions won’t be enough, either. Americans will demand reliable information, summarized intelligently, in any conveyance they can access — including paper, Internet and cell phones — because one or more may be knocked out at times.

Folks either will be willing to pay for information or — more likely — corporations will see value in advertising to consumers of news. The news media might become a defense-related industry. More likely is that advertisers will be trading in war. Munitions and the like pulled the country out of the Great Depression via World War II: You think Rosie the Riveter was knocking out hot tubs? Advertisers will see a market and subsidize the news for us. Investigative reporting, declining in the cutbacks due to its cost, will return to value. Readers and viewers will insist on the truth.

In recent months, news executives and academics have proposed ways the news business can return to profitability. Slate summarized them well, from non-profit status to pulling back from publicly owned incorporation, and hybrid forms. Between these and various online consumer payment setups, we have multiple ways of securing the barn doors after the critters left: Yale lock, Master or Kryptonite? They’re untested in today’s circumstances. Sure, the Burger Crowd or Starbucks models could be studied. I don’t know. We never tried the restaurant business.

When people really want news, and badly enough, what they will afford will become Blow Your Nose Money. Until blood flows, our media free fall will continue.

Would you like extra foam on your latte?

-30-

No matter the bereaved, it’s always more about them. It can’t be helped. Still, the best remembrances accomplish the intent: We mourners learn about the one who left.

Infamous Arkansas editor John R. Starr was discovered at his service to have been a good father and devoted husband. A man with a reputation among politicians and his employees as a bully had coached youth baseball for years. This was imparted by family members and tearful former baseball proteges. They were talking about themselves.

Starr hired my friend Connie Elkins some years before he offered me an evening-shift copy editing job in 1985.

Connie Elkins, family photo, via Robinson Funeral Home, Pine Bluff

She was a copy editor but one who worked 7:30-3:30 editing features for the sections built in advance — style, society, religion, travel and so on. I was aware of her but had not grown close until early in 1987, when I was promoted to wire editor, selecting and further editing of national and international articles from wire services, with a 10-6 shift.

Until Connie’s retirement in June 1991, I sat between her and Celia Storey, then another day copy editor and now in charge of recreation and fitness coverage. If my first 18 months on the night desk confirmed the rightness of returning to Arkansas to live and newspapering as the right career, the weekdays spent next to Connie cemented them. (Celia starting in 1988 would encourage and edit my humor column Mirthology.)

Connie Elkins was a consummate newspaper professional. A conventional professional — a lawyer or dentist — looks quiet, serious, competent and knows their power and uses it well. The best newspapermen and newspaperwomen are all of those as well, except they’re rarely quiet and don’t keep their seriousness in check. Connie would bemoan careless reporting when she came across it and was merciless about bad grammar and carelessness about people’s names. But what other newsroom personnel would remember are her peals of near-raucous laughter that traveled even to corner offices. She roared at the work, but more often she laughed at the cracks made by her colleagues while working (merge in your imagination the TV shows Lou Grant and M*A*S*H).

A newsroom structurally can influence that attitude. Until 1992, the Arkansas Democrat’s city room comprised most of the early 20th-century building’s second story, holding around a hundred editors and reporters, writers and photographers. Everything was dingy and old, except for the occasional fresh, cheap chair to replace a worn-out one. Smoking — that would not be banned until the move to a renovated, previously unused third floor — yellowed the paint. Smoke would have smudged clear windows, but ages earlier those had been replaced with milk glass so the space had no direct light. The second floor was Linoleum, the 12-inch tiles alternated black and white into a surreal checkerboard. In the 1980s, however, it was free of typewriter clacking, due to the company having gone largely electronic. Thus while it felt like the 1950s, you could hear yourself think and easily converse.

My first memories of Connie Elkins thus have that strong visual and aural component, besides her personality. As an editor, Connie was meticulous; nothing got past her. We would discuss the news of the day, and her wise eye would help me prepare for the daily 1A budget meeting. The only part of her life outside of work of which I was aware would be that her youngest daughter, Cynda, a bit younger than me, came in sometimes so they could enjoy a lunch out.

The second phase of our friendship began the night of her 1991 retirement party. I went out of my fondness for Connie. Also, I was anxious to meet Paul Greenberg, who had just accepted the position of editorial page editor of the Democrat, resigning from the similar post at the Pine Bluff Commercial. Paul knew Connie from her years there.  The party was at the home of George Wells, a reporter with the Arkansas Gazette, where Connie also had worked. This was a warm, chatty evening where competition was left behind. Cynda and her fiance brought along Cynda’s cute best friend. That woman in a couple of years became My Beloved.

When MB had moved to Little Rock in the mid-1980 and grew close to Cynda, Connie took on the role of MB’s local mom. She welcomed MB to virtually all family gatherings, from Christmas mornings to Buffalo River float trips. When MB and I married in 1993, I became in turn something of an adopto-quasi-son-in-law. Work invariably kept me from the long weekend outings, though MB went, but I spent Christmases and some pleasant afternoons in Connie’s Pine Bluff home and in recent years, her place in Little Rock.

Her conversation with MB was intimate, familial. With me, through our last visit many months ago, Connie just wanted to talk shop: newsroom politics, newsroom gossip and the world news of the day.

Yet when I picture Connie now, I see her in the newsroom, chortling loudly while typing really fast, multitasking as copy editors do. Her appearance in the office was matriarchal, perhaps a little intimidating to staff who didn’t know her. It never took long for anyone who cared to look to see past the gruff grande dame editor persona to see a wide-ranging intelligence and that her quips and laughter never had an edge.