Baltimore's Riot of 2015

In the matter of Freddie Gray

the 'routine' has vastly changed

During a 40-year career in the news business, I came up with my "two first laws of journalism": 

No. 1 is "Cops Lie."

No. 2 is "Cops can't spell."

I mean no disrespect for officers of the law. I like most cops I've met. But I deemed it important for folks in the news business to understand that cops are very much like other folks you meet -- they do not always tell the truth or get things right.

Face it -- everybody lies. Maybe not all the time, but sometimes. And who hasn't made a spelling error? The point is to understand that information you are being given may not be accurate or true. Journalists have an obligation to check facts and get other points of view. Truth can be elusive, perhaps not even possible to ascertain.

I learned about cops lying -- or perhaps not telling all the truth -- as a young police reporter at The Baltimore Sun nearly half a century ago. A tactical squad sergeant invited me to go along on drug investigations and raids with his team of about half a dozen men. But I had to make a deal with the devil. I might witness some activities that I had to agree not to report in my story.

The first such incident came as the cops were trying to locate a drug dealer, and leaned on his mentally slow brother-in-law for information, stopping by the man's tiny street-level apartment in pre-urban renewal South Baltimore. They told the man he faced arrest for drug possession and, to his denials, got him to agree to a search of his dwelling. As they rummaged around, one of the officers planted a packet of powder under a lamp, then "found" the supposed drugs. The guy was scared. And then, to avoid arrest, he told the team where to find his brother-in-law's drug stash nearby.

That was a little deception, a warrantless search -- a shakedown, really --  at the expense of a simple-minded citizen of Baltimore to get what they wanted. And it was part of the investigative process that I was bound by our agreement not to report.

Which brings us to Pennsylvania Avenue, in 1969 an epicenter of illegal drug activity -- and this week, an epicenter of the protests over the strange death in police custody of Freddie Gray.

It was another investigation here by the squad, this time with a search warrant for a building that had a padlocked front door. Two men sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of that building were detained, while the squad broke open the padlock and began combing through a 3-foot-deep heap of trash piled inside. They found, at the bottom of a trash can under the pile of debris, a plastic bag containing filled drug capsules.

Neither of the suspects resided in the building, and neither had a key to the padlock. Neither was holding drugs. They had been sitting in chairs on a public sidewalk. And they were charged with possession with intent to distribute narcotics.

In the official report on their arrest on drug charges, the cops wrote that the men were "on the premises."

As distasteful I deemed their deception in the case of the feeble-minded brother-in-law, which I was unable to recount in my story, I realized in the Pennsylvania Avenue arrests that the cops were lying in their official report -- and this time, I was free to write the circumstances of the search and arrests, and quote from the official report by the police that the suspects had been "on the premises."

They were not in jail very long. Defense lawyers noted my first-hand account as proof that the men had been outside the premises -- not on the premises. 

I asked the sergeant about that, and whether the men his team had arrested were in fact guilty. "They were dealing drugs, Dave," was the sergeant's reply. "Maybe not there, but they were drug dealers."

"On the premises" was an example of using vague language to avoid the truth. It was so routine that the cops hardly saw it as lying. 

Which brings us, 46 years later, to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, whose arrest on April 12 was partially recorded on video -- just the last seconds, in which he was shown face-down on a sidewalk, a cop on either side of him, and then, seeming unable to walk, dragged to the back of a prisoner transport van. He was shouting in apparent pain.

Police reported that Gray had been "arrested without incident."

It is a phrase so routine, perhaps the officers themselves could not see it as untrue. From their point of view, Gray's arrest was routine. He had made eye contact with them, then ran, and he was chased, caught, handcuffed and loaded into the van. That's what they do.

But it was hardly routine for Freddie Gray, whose short life was marred by childhood exposure to lead dust in his mother's cheap rental home and later a long rap sheet of drug arrests.

Sometime between eye contact and Gray becoming unresponsive and not breathing, his spinal cord had been snapped. He died a week later.

The death became Baltimore's Missouri Moment -- its turn in the global spotlight, with angry demonstrations following deaths at the hands of police  in Ferguson, Mo., New York City and other communities. Charm City, one of the local and usually ludicrous nicknames, is under a State of Emergency and occupied by National Guard soldiers after the demonstrations grew into a riot of looting, burning and violence.

Later this week, police promise a fuller report on Gray's arrest and death as the department turns over the investigation to the Baltimore state's attorney's office -- the prosecutorial arm of the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, six police officers involved with the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray remain suspended with pay.

And key questions from a period of some 30 minutes remain unanswered -- starting with what was the "probable cause" for Freddie Gray's arrest. The joke, of course, is that he was simply "running while black." And how could his spinal cord have snapped? Before that bystander's video began, did an officer have a knee resting on Gray's neck? Left unattended and without a safety restraint in the caged confines of the transport van, was he given a "rough ride" to the police station?

Nothing here is simple, other than the public response to deaths at the hands of or in custody of police in a nation that has changed, remarkably, since the 1960s. 

What once was routine is anything but.

Newspapers: A very unmerry birthday

Little cause to celebrate
as Baltimore Sun turns 172,
a shadow of its storied past

The Baltimore Sun turned 172 on Sunday, but the birthday was not much cause for celebration as the pain and uncertainty from its mass firings/layoffs of nearly a third of the news and editorial staff continues.

Latest to go appears to be reporter Nick Madigan, but unlike many others at the newspaper in recent weeks, Nick saw his layoff coming – in painfully slow motion.

Even an act of amazing generosity by a colleague, aimed at saving his job at the cost of her own, could not save Nick because of the seniority numbers game that determined who is in line for the personnel axe.

Jobs started rolling like severed heads at The Sun at the end of April, in two days of instant layoffs that targeted news and editorial managers and then union-jurisdiction staffers. The bloodbath, carried out amid extra security in the newspaper building, claimed at least 61 jobs.

But because of a union contract – a rarity in the anti-union Tribune empire – seniority protected some longtime employees initially given layoffs, enabling them to bump into job classifications they had previously held. Longtime copy editors, for example, could go back to being reporters.

Who was vulnerable to being bumped? Some of the younger staffers were protected by the company with moves into newly-created jobs that were outside union jurisdiction – enabling the company to zero in for firing on older, and higher-paid, employees. Some others with only a few years at The Sun stayed in jobs they loved and hunkered down as best they could in these uncertain times for the print newspaper industry.

The night of May 8, when the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild held a party – a wake, really – to honor both the union and nonunion victims of the purge, it was apparent that job bumping was imminent and some still-employed colleagues like Nick Madigan were on shaky ground. No one was comfortable with the prospect of staffers wanting to keep their jobs having to bump others out the door. It was just another ugly reality of life under the Tribune Company.

That’s when veteran education reporter Sara Neufeld told Nick that, to save his job, she was going to volunteer for a layoff. She’s young, and hasn’t started a family, while Nick is married, the father of a four-year-old son, and faced with a mortgage on the house he and his wife bought after moving from Los Angeles to Baltimore four years ago.

Nick said he didn’t want Sara to quit her job if the only reason was to save his, but that she assured him she had wanted to pursue other opportunities and suddenly found herself with a reason to do so. As it turned out, Sara’s act didn’t help Nick directly, but rather another employee further up the seniority chain.

Still, Nick was stunned at what he called Sara’s “amazingly selfless” offer, a far cry from the manner in which many of their colleagues were driven out of the newspaper they loved.

“I was very touched by what Sara did, and it proves that there are some very fine people at the paper,” said Nick, who left the newsroom Friday to a round of applause from colleagues. “I’m sad to leave The Sun, not only because I'll miss the crew of characters who put it out every day – some of them good friends and all of them very dedicated – but also because its newsroom is probably the last one I'll work for, and after a 29-year career in newspapers and wire services, that's hard to take.”

Nick has written from around the United States and more than 20 other countries, including France, Morocco, Britain, Mexico, Haiti and Cuba. For The New York Times, he covered the Columbia shuttle disaster, the trials of Michael Jackson and Winona Ryder, the William Kennedy Smith rape case and other stories in California, Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. He also worked on the staffs of the Palm Beach Post, Variety and United Press International, for which he covered the Invasion of Grenada among other stories throughout the Caribbean.

He left his position as a contract writer for The New York Times’ Los Angeles bureau in 2005 to take the job as national media writer for The Sun. But after two years, The Sun, which had begun cutting its personnel and narrowing the scope of its staff’s coverage, eliminated Nick’s beat. He was assigned to the “Sun Rising” team, which was tasked with beefing up coverage of breaking news for the Web site and expanding stories for subsequent print editions. More recently, he’s been covering criminal justice stories, notably the case of Nicholas Browning, who murdered his parents and brothers, and the Rodgers Forge parents who starved their infant son.

On one of my increasingly rare visits to the newsroom a few months ago, I found Nick working a police story and expressed hope that he hadn’t been thrust into a beat he didn’t want or enjoy. But Nick said, enthusiastically, that he was doing the job he always loved – news reporter. He had no complaint about the role.

Not that it much matters now, but Nick said he received his last “performance evaluation” from the company Wednesday, and it was, he said, “pretty damn good.”

(The company went to enormous lengths to create its performance-evaluation system and force a change in the union contract so that annual raises could be based on merit – although it proved to be grossly arbitrary in determining the winners and losers, and was more demoralizing than constructive. And now that The Sun is simply firing people – many of them among the most talented and experienced – it proves the evaluation system to have been an irrelevant waste of time and resources.)

As for Sara, a Sun staffer since 2003 and earlier an education reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, she emailed a note to friends about her decision, in addition to announcing her imminent departure on her education-beat blog at baltimoresun.com. (The responses from readers are telling about how highly her work was regarded by the community that The Sun ostensibly wants to reach online.)

In her note to friends, Sara wrote of the reporters with low seniority about to lose their jobs through bumping:

“One is a friend who is the sole provider of his family of three and stands to lose his house. As he was telling me about his plight last week, I found myself blurting out that I'd like to give my job to save his.

“I was shocked by my words as soon as they were out of my mouth, but ever since then, it's been increasingly clear to me that leaving now will be the right thing for me as well as for whatever reporter whose job I save (unfortunately, I don't think it will be his, but it depends on how the bumping situation plays out over the next few days).

“I'll get five months of severance and vacation time, and I am confident from some job inquiries I've made recently that something will come through during that period. And, though I'm really sad to leave some wonderful colleagues and a great beat, I'll get out of what has become an increasingly unhappy environment. I would also be incredibly sad to leave my adopted home of Baltimore, but so far most of my prospects are in New York City, which would put me with my sister and a quick train ride from the rest of my family.

“So, I don't know what's next, except that 16 years after I fell in love with newspaper reporting as a high school sophomore, it's time to try something new, likely in education. I'm lucky that I've developed a second passion for the subject I've covered for nearly a decade, and public schools aren't going away nearly as quickly as newspapers are.”

Today, Monday, will be Sara’s last day at The Sun.

Nick said his treatment by top Sun editors was at least humane, given the advance notice a week earlier from Sam Davis, the newsroom’s assistant managing editor for administration who has found himself in the unfortunate role of a messenger with bad news for so many employees. Nick said he was advised to hang on to the possibility of a call-back until the bumping deadline of May 27 should others ahead of him in seniority rankings decide not to come back or, like Sara, volunteer for a layoff.

But even if he manages a return, there is no certainty of a future for anyone at The Baltimore Sun these days.

Sunday, as noted earlier, was the venerable newspaper’s 172nd birthday. When an institution is that old, such occasions rarely get notice – except maybe at numbers divisible by 25, when the marketing folks take advantage of it as a sales pitch.

The last such occasion included a specially fat commemorative Sunday edition of The Sun and this slogan: “The Story of Our Lives for 150 Years.”

I have that slogan sitting in front of me, emblazoned on a white commemorative mug produced for the 150th birthday. The metallic gold lettering is beginning to chip away with the passage of time and the mug’s delivery of an occasional dose of caffeine.

The Sun will turn 175 on May 17, 2012 – if it lives.

A lot of people have their doubts.

Out-sourcing the news

Sun’s 'nation & world' page
latest in cloning journalism

There was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire.

And there was a time when you could almost say that about The Baltimore Sun, for all the foreign correspondents it had spread around the planet. London, Paris, Bonn, Rio, New Delhi, Moscow. Over the years, the countries changed with the times. There was Tokyo, then Beijing. Johannesburg. Mexico City. And its Washington Bureau was not too shabby, with a dozen folks reporting the goings-on of government just for Sun readers.

Nothing new about the cutbacks, really – what was left of the foreign offices closed last year. The Sun's Washington Bureau has pretty much become overview reports and analysis by the very capable Paul West.

The latest move, inevitable given the trend, is the source of The Sun’s “nation & world” page: Not Baltimore.

About the time I took leave of The Sun in 2007 with a voluntary buyout to end a 40-year career, unsettling plans were under way to replace the newsroom computers used for writing, editing and page design with equipment like that in the parent Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune flagship newspaper. It would simplify production of news outside Baltimore – I foresaw a day when the national desk would be fully located in Chicago, with pages designed around advertising holes that would be common for every paper in Tribune chain.

I wasn’t the only staffer leaving the paper then, or in the subsequent series of other buyouts and layoffs that saw the reporting and editing staff shrink substantially.

So I really wasn’t surprised when I noticed the change on an inside page in Sunday’s news section: It was readily apparent from the jarringly different headline style and typefaces that the page did not originate in the Baltimore Sun newsroom or, necessarily, in a unionized newsroom.

Something you need to know about Baltimore natives, of which there are few these days in the newsroom: They’re xenophobic. Many of them, anyway. I haven’t sufferered from that malady beyond my intense dislike of the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Steelers, and what became of the Baltimore Colts, of course.

Now I have nothing against the cities of New York, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis – and I kind of like Chicago. But it just sticks in my craw when folks from there come here, take over and muck things up so badly.

This is not to say that Jim Puzzanghera, Maura Reynolds and James Oliphant are bad journalists. They’re fine, I’m sure. They’re the folks whose bylines appeared in Wednesday’s “nation & world” page atop an identifying line stating “Washington Bureau.”

Trouble is, Toto, it’s not the Baltimore Sun Washington Bureau anymore. They’re Tribune folks covering the news for papers in Baltimore and probably every other city in the financially bankrupt chain -- although not in same shrunken format for the company's "major" papers in Chicago and Los Angeles, I'm told.

It’s the price readers across the nation are paying for consolidation of the newspaper industry: Unique and varied reporting is diminished. The Fourth Estate is weakened.

I remember when The Sun redesigned the back page of the Maryland section, back when it had a Maryland section, to compete with the colorful weather page produced by USA Today. (Now the weather report in The Sun is minimized on an inside page, pretty much the way it was decades ago.)

The news stories, alas, are following suit – smaller, minimized inside. Except there aren’t nearly as many stories as in USA Today. And if you hunger for national and international news, The Sun is in eclipse.

A newsroom friend told me the change took place last Thursday, and others likely are coming – more national and international news created, edited, designed in Chicago for readers in Baltimore, and a likelihood there will be ever-fewer copy editors and page designers needed locally to produce The Sun. There might even be a redesign so the ugly typefaces and headline fonts used in Chicago are duplicated in Baltimore.

As I said, I’m not surprised. I saw it coming. Maybe the readers didn’t even notice, it’s such “inside baseball.”

Once upon a time, The Baltimore Sun was among the handful of U.S. newspapers on the desk of the President.

Not much point in that these days.

Baltimore as comic fodder

Jay Leno noted Wednesday night the proposal in Baltimore for a restaurant serving up sushi on topless women.

“Is that a good combination?” Leno asked. “Naked women and seafood in a city famous for crabs?”

Today’s fortune cookie message:

You find beauty in ordinary things. Do not lose this ability.

Daily number: 538

The future of newspapers

Blogger Ettlin, on last day working in Baltimore Sun newsroom, May 31, 2007.

A columnist friend presents
a troubling question to ponder

My friend Dan Rodricks, the longtime Baltimore Sun columnist, posted a question on Facebook today, fishing for others’ thoughts:

If newspaper publishers want to win the day, why not shut down all their free web sites? To increase the value of the metropolitan dailies, like the one I work for, why not shut down the web and make the print editions the only way to get this valuable resource? We never should have given the news away for free, with any expectation that the print editions could survive. Now, with revenues and old-fashion paid circulation falling, why shouldn't we go back the other way -- on recycled paper, of course -- and say to the public: "If you want this, pay for it?"

I had a front-row seat in the same newsroom some 35 years ago when the first computers walked in – and it wasn’t pretty. The computers weren’t very good, but the printers recognized the threat right away. Their jobs were on the line.

For awhile, the computers hummed along with clanking Linotype machines. Some pages were put together the old-fashioned way, as pieces of cast metal and every line of a story a chunk of words you could hold and feel in your hand; others were assembled as a cut-and-paste job after the words spilled out of a darkroom-like enclosure in columns on glossy paper.

Printers made the usual mistakes: Sometimes a line would literally drop and vanish. Or maybe a few paragraphs would slip on deadline out of big Bob Bowman’s hand as he rushed toward the chase – the metal frame holding the page – and he’d reassemble them line by line, bending over the scattered slugs of metal on the hard wooden floor and reading them backwards since that’s the way type was cast. The amusing result, when it wasn’t caught on time in proofreading, was called “scrambled type.”

For a while, the Harris computers up in the newsroom imitated the printers. Scroll the dozen or so lines visible on the little greenish “video display terminal” display too quickly, and it would delete a line here and duplicate another there, usually making critical paragraphs unintelligible.

But the printers knew what was happening, and fought back at contract time. The pages still made of metal, they controlled – largely the classified advertising. And for one memorable Sunday edition, they inserted some extra pieces of metal, actually a lot of pieces of metal, in various sizes and fonts declaring many times on every page throughout the classified section: “Fuck The Sun Up The Ass.”

The phones started ringing minutes after the first edition – known as the “Bulldog” – hit the streets that Saturday afternoon. Supervisors dispatched to the composing room rooted through the pages trying to eliminate every hunk of terrorist type, but among the dozens of pages of classified ads, it was an impossible task. The subsequent editions included a full-page explanation and apology to readers.

The printers eventually won lifetime contracts that took nearly three decades for successor owners (Times Mirror and Tribune) to eliminate through attrition and buyouts, the last of them departing with settlements far more lucrative than those offered over the past decade in departments whose unions had no such lifetime guarantees.

Sign of times to come

In the end, the composing room where pages were set into type and assembled, which took up an entire floor of the newspaper building, had been reduced to a small office area where a sardonic sign was posted reading: “Decomposing Room.”

But who could imagine how much “decomposing” was in the newspaper’s future.

Departments had given way, one by one, as computers got smaller and better – engravers, lithographers, proofreaders, even telephone operators – the list goes on. (So far, security guard seems a safe occupation, although that task has long been outsourced to lowest-bidder, low-paying companies, as has janitorial work. Late at night, in the largely emptied newsroom, Spanish becomes the dominant language.)

I never thought online newspapers would happen so quickly. But one day, the computers caught up with photographic images and it became a simple matter to integrate “type” and “art” on an electronic page, and then posting on the Internet picked up speed, and newspaper companies started putting news and pictures together in pages anyone could see anywhere in the world much faster than a print edition could be manufactured and delivered.

And, as my friend Dan observed, most big newspaper gave it away for free. Some tried selling it, but retreated because so many others were not.

Mail-order subscriptions were as good as dead, and home-delivery editions – well, we know what’s happening in circulation numbers industry-wide. Fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers.

The question I pose is whether all those folks who are no longer buying newspapers are, instead, reading them online.

I bet not – at least not in the sense of turning pages. Newspaper sites are click-on driven, with stories tallied up as “page views.” Advertising is an annoyance, and the news sites try their best to force clicks onto ads to suggest that readers noticed them. Counts are what counts in this strange electronic information age.

And the “pages” mostly don’t look like newspaper pages. Click on a headline to read a story, click back to find another. Packaging of news is awkward, so threads of content are hard to follow. Few sites reproduce a full newspaper image beyond that of the front page.

People are reading newspapers less, and getting their news and information through alternative sources – not all of them as responsible as major daily newspapers.

And the newspapers themselves continue to contribute to their own demise by shrinking content, and original reporting. At The Sun, which once had its own network of foreign bureaus, unique international journalism is largely dead. It once had correspondents based in London, Paris, Rio, Bonn, New Delhi, Moscow, Tel Aviv (later Jerusalem), Johannesburg, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Beijing, and maybe a few others, though not all at the same time. They’re gone now.

The foreign editor took a buyout. There was no one left to manage and edit, really – just stories off wire service stories and from Tribune correspondents working for sister newspapers.

The highly regarded Sun Washington Bureau has shrunk, inevitably.

Once upon a very long time ago, The Baltimore Sun had a promotional slogan -- The Sun: One of America’s Great Newspapers.

A talented editor named Steve Luxenberg was leaving for better climes (he ended up at The Washington Post), and was smiling at a camera for the candid photo that would appear on a fake front page commemorating his departure. Behind him was a large horizontal poster image bannering the slogan. Steve, perhaps jokingly, put his hand over the word “Great.”

The Sun: One of America’s Newspapers.

Assessing blame

I can blame The Sun for its own decline only to a limit. There was, after all, the 1986 change from privately-held company to corporate ownership, and now being part of the Tribune media empire caught up bankruptcy filings in the ocean of debt created in the privatization purchase by billionaire real estate investor Sam Zell in the name of a fictional employee ownership plan.

But there were many decisions at home that alienated readers, time and again. Among them:

+ The company murdered its once-dominant evening newspaper earlier than necessary, forcing circulation down by duplicating content from the morning edition and figuring rightly that subscribers taking both papers would cancel the evening one. When numbers had dropped close enough to 100,000, the company used the plunging circulation to justify the end. It would have happened eventually, but the killing was premature and alienated many readers who for all their lives had preferred the evening paper.

+ The newspaper more recently alienated mainstay older subscribers with content changes that included eliminating stock tables from the daily edition, wrongly figuring they could readily turn to the Internet.

+ It redesigned the paper several times, always shrinking content in the process; for a time, it shrunk the highly read sports section into a tabloid format with far less space (and in reversing course with a return to a broadsheet format, the section was thinner than before).

+ There was a memorable note, about a year ago, from the powers overseeing the newspaper pushing increased use of photos and graphics, at a time when the news hole was already shrinking. Readers supposedly needed more charts and fewer stories. How about a pie chart in the face?

Slim pickin’s

There’s hardly enough paper in the paper for a modest crab feast.

The daily “Metro” or “Maryland” section is gone, preceded by the daily “Business” section. Now, the daily paper is just three sections – News (including local, national, international and business), Sports and You.

Yup, You. Whatever you’s are left, anyway.

Sometimes I grow wistful for the days when The Sun promoted itself as “Maryland’s Marketplace” and “Maryland’s Newspaper.” But time and again, it would launch expanded coverage of the rural counties, only to retreat to the core metropolitan area. Recently, the last dedicated Eastern Shore reporter was moved westward across the Chesapeake Bay to join a slimmed-down news staff based in Annapolis. In response, he took a buyout, or what’s now called a “voluntary layoff,” in the latest round of staff reductions across the newspaper.

The mission of The Sun – I still think of it as “my newspaper,” having worked there four decades and outlasting half a dozen folks called “publishers” before my buyout ship came in last year – has narrowed. And you can read what’s left for free on the Internet, where you’ll find dozens of other sources for the national and international news that used to be part and parcel of a “great” newspaper. Unfortunately, a lot of that news is coming from fewer sources.

You’ll also find on the Internet a clamor of other voices, some spreading truth and others lies, in a cacophony of information... a buzzing, even. A very loud buzzing.

Pandora’s box was opened, after all, and the bees are everywhere.

Dan, I’m afraid there’s no going back. We’ve given people too many reasons not to read newspapers.

For those who can access it, here’s a link to Dan Rodricks’ posting: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/topic.php?uid=42618730754&topic=6300&ref=mf

Maybe smaller is better

The National Public Radio program “Weekend America” had a related segment today, the thrust being that predictions of the demise of newspapers are premature. Newspapers currently have a profit margin averaging around 11 percent. But the profit is less than it used to be, and declining, and the largest newspapers are having bigger woes than smaller ones – and there are many more in the “smaller” category, where circulations may be around 35,000 daily instead of a quarter-million or more.

I’ve been working lately in a temporary, part-time editing job at the Baltimore Business Journal, a weekly newspaper with a daily Web report that takes up a big part of my two-day schedule. This week, though, I was asked to write a short opinion piece looking at the Tribune bankruptcy in light of my long association with The Sun.

It is supposed to appear in next Friday’s edition; I’ll post a link when it happens.

‘You will succeed in business’

Yeah, right. Sounds like something you’d find in a fortune cookie.

Well, The Real Muck is introducing a new feature: Fortune cookie message of the day, mostly courtesy of our favorite restaurant, the Szechuan Cafe in Pasadena, Maryland.

Here goes. Hold your breath.

Serious trouble will bypass you.

Your three-digit lottery number is 600.

Good luck.

A Day Frozen In Time

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
(Or tuck it away for posterity)

Newspapers as instant history

Occasionally, over the course of my 40 years at The Baltimore Sun, I would be called on to visit a school and talk about newspapers. I would bring a sampling of them – the type with gaudy front pages after a monster storm, a big fire, the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

And I would hold up a copy of my old newspaper from Jan. 16, 1946, when almost nothing of interest happened but it had cost me 40 bucks. It was the day I was born, and the newspaper likely was being printed about the same time (12:04 a.m.) when I was coming down the chute.

Newspapers, I would tell the children (usually ages 12-14), present history in slow motion. Stop-action, even. A frozen day in time. How important that day of history is may depend upon who is reading or keeping that edition.

Wednesday, newspapers across the world froze a day in time for posterity. Some did it really, really well. Some... could have been better.

I say this because I went off to work in the morning (a temporary, part-time editing gig with the weekly Baltimore Business Journal) and neglected to buy a copy of The Washington Post.

I had The Baltimore Sun, of course – it arrived in its usual yellow plastic bag in the grass just off the driveway, in better-than-usual condition. I opened it at work downtown – more about what I saw later.

In the evening, on the way home, the Post was nowhere to be found, not in the vending machines, the gas stations, convenience stores or supermarkets – not even in the semi-redneck parts of my Pasadena community.

By today, Thursday, it and the likes of The New York Times and USA Today are all over eBay -- dozens of listings, including one offering a still-wrapped bundle of the Wednesday Post's final edition at more than $300.

Some newspapers totally get it. They were presenting history writ very, very large, with a front page telling in an instant that your grandchildren should hold it some day and marvel at the keepsake. An heirloom that, if not cared for, will by then be flaking around the edges on the way to becoming dust.

I once bought a copy of The New York Times from the day my late mother was born in 1914, a Sunday, and presented it at her surprise 80th birthday party. (Couldn’t find an intact Baltimore paper.) Taken out of its thick plastic packing, the Sunday Times crumbled a bit in her hands. It wasn’t a very special day in anyone else’s history so just its existence in 1994 was amazing. (I also read from a microfilm printout of that day’s Baltimore Sun a small travel advertisement for fall bookings on the steamship Lusitania – whose sailing the next spring didn’t turn out very well.)

But some newspapers can be so very special. Like the editions of Nov. 5, 2008.

The Baltimore newspaper, a victim of its recent redesign, wasn’t bad. It had a half-page-deep Associated Press photo of a waving Obama from the torso up, against a dark background, with an out-of-focus flag behind him in the nighttime setting at Chicago’s Grant Park. (The better photo, in black-and-white atop Page 5 of the inside-the-paper Election Section, from McClatchy-Tribune, showed Obama, his wife and children walking onto the slightly elevated stage and dwarfed by the enormous crowd assembled as far as the eye could see, and the lighted city skyline a distant but dramatic backdrop.)

The front-page headline, in yellow, declared “It’s Obama” with a much smaller five-liner in white just below and to the right: “Democrat gains historic victory, will be the nation’s first black president.”

Under the fold, played with the main story at center-page, was a smallish John McCain, also in front of an out-of-focus flag, looking constipated.

(A sticker advertisement had to be peeled off the page top, next to Obama’s open hand, taking with it some of the ink and leaving a rectangular patch of gray dots.)

I hate to say my old paper blew it. But I could still find a few copies in vending machines and at stores on the way home. (The newspaper announced it would be selling a reprinted edition of some 45,000 in stores on Thursday, to address demand, and I bought a pair of them for my collection. The Post was producing a commemorative edition of its Wednesday paper costing $1.50, double or more the usual daily price. It didn't get to my neighborhood.)

But here’s what’s fascinating – you can look at the day’s front pages of 714 newspapers from around world online, courtesy of the Newseum (hopefully they’ll all still be available for viewing when you click on the “Archive” link at this site: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages).

Check out the papers of Nov. 5, 2008. You’ll see The Baltimore Sun, which I feel didn’t quite rise to the moment as visually or powerfully as many of the others.

Among the first couple at the Newseum site, I kind of liked the Los Angeles Daily News’ ‘A NEW DAWN’ and the Tahoe Daily Tribune AMERICA CHOOSES CHANGE and the New Haven Register’s HISTORIC VICTORY and the Palm Beach Post’s HISTORY.

Scroll through this amazing presentation and savor the moment. HISTORY, also writ large on the Kansas City Star and so many others.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey:

OBAMA REACHES THE MOUNTAINTOP

The Albuquerque Journal: HISTORIC DAY IN AMERICA

And in others: YES, HE DID!; FROM DREAM TO HISTORY; PRESIDENT OBAMA

So many of them, all in big, bold caps, telling what we already knew.

They’re newspapers you don’t even have to read, although the stories in them likely are terrific.

Remember this new day in your heart, and tuck your newspaper away somewhere safe.

But if you have a copy you don’t need, my address is P.O Box 1152, Pasadena, MD 21123. I have a little more room in the old steamer trunk.

Catch This Play

All blog and no play?
Well, that’s easy to remedy

It was, in the words of Voltaire, “the best of all possible worlds.”

My wife Bonnie wanted a visit to the theater – which was embarrassingly lacking in our entertainment of late – and I needed a little catharsis, having not yet come to grips with the sad ending of the local baseball season.

I took her request to “take me out” to a play... any play... as literally as possible. Bought the tickets, but didn’t tell her what play we were seeing until we got to Baltimore’s Fells Point Corner Theatre Friday night.

The title: “Take Me Out.”

The subject: Baseball, sort of and sort of not.

When she saw the title and the historic baseball photos decorating the small lobby of the theater’s converted firehouse, Bonnie was prepared for the worst – but instead got what she really wanted in seeing a fine play, terrific acting performances, and... male nudity.

The setting of Richard Greenberg’s play is the locker room of a fictional Major League team, the Empires, whose $100 million star centerfielder Darren Lemming has made a startling revelation: He’s gay.

How his teammates and best friend react is the plot in a three-act tale that mixes drama and comedy, and illustrates the depth of baseball as life metaphor and sexual double-entendre.

It’s not all about strikes and balls, although the latter – well, they hung out quite noticeably. I asked Bonnie when she had seen so many penises all at once, and she noted that there were no more than three visible at any one time on stage. So what can I say? She knew the count.

See, it’s those baseball double-entendres again, rearing their ugly heads.

Well, maybe not ugly. That’s just a little high and inside hyperbole on my part.

In fact, nudity is integral to the story, given the way of the locker room and a gradual stripping away of the layers of protection behind which people hide their true feelings about life and each other.

The local production directed by Terry J. Long stars Maboud Ebrahimzadeh (http://maboudebrahimzadeh.com/) as a remarkably believable Lemming, heading up an effective nine-man stage lineup that also features Tony Viglione as his well-meaning teammate and wannabe friend Kippy Sunderstrom, and Sean Mullin as late season call-up pitching closer and homophobic, ignorant racist wacko Shane Mungitt. (For baseball fans, magnify John Rocker twentyfold or better.)

For a guy who later acknowledged not knowing any Japanese, Gary Deleon adds a colorful supporting performance as star pitcher Takeshi Kawabatta, who supposedly knows no English, and Edward Zarkowski positively and comically flames as gay accountant Mason Marzac, who is assigned the financial adviser job to post-closet Lemming.

Most of the audience was male, gay, and enthusiastic, and that really added to the ambiance of the evening.

It also provided a novelty for Bonnie: It was the women’s room that had no line at intermission.

If you’re anywhere near Baltimore, “Take Me Out” runs only through Oct. 19 at the theater at 251 South Ann St., three days before the real-life World Series is scheduled to begin at Boston or Tampa Bay. Play tickets and information: http://www.fpct.org/.

R.I.P. ‘Uncle’ Albert

I was reading the death notices in Saturday's paper and found a beloved newspaper colleague listed among the departed, Albert Sehlstedt Jr.

I affectionately called him “Uncle Albert.” He was long an inspiration and friend during my career at The Baltimore Sun, where he had been over the course of nearly 40 years the newspaper’s congressional reporter and carved out a beat in aviation and aerospace.

Though a lay person himself, Al explained difficult science in a way that most readers could understand. I asked him once how he managed to do that, and Al modestly credited the scientists who gave their time to patiently answer his many questions.

He covered the American space program from its inception, through the moon landings and Challenger disaster. Not about to overwrite his prose, Al crafted this lede to his Houston-datelined story on the event of July 20, 1969, that electrified and for a shining moment united this planet:

Men from earth stepped onto the surface of the moon tonight.

Two American astronauts realized a dream of centuries by treading on the powdery lunar surface nearly seven hours after making a “very smooth” landing in the moon’s Sea of Tranquility.

Neil A. Armstrong, 38, of Wapakonela. Ohio, made the first historic step at 10:56 P.M., descending a ladder of nine rungs on one of four legs of the lunar landing craft. He was followed by Col. Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., 39, USAF, of Montclair, N.J., at 11:14 P.M. As Mr. Armstrong put his first foot on the surface, he said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Al was, inevitably, among the huge media throng when the shuttle Challenger exploded in the beautiful January sky off Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1986. His terse lede:

The space shuttle Challenger exploded 74 seconds after liftoff yesterday, killing all seven astronauts, including New Hampshire high school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

Two orange balls of fire shot from either side of the shuttle’s normal white trail of engine smoke before the entire craft disappeared into an enormous fireball eight miles east of the launching site as Challenger climbed toward orbit in an often delayed 25th shuttle mission.

At the funeral home Saturday, Al's press badges from the historic Apollo 11 lunar mission and Challenger's ill-fated "Shuttle 51L" mission were pinned in the center of a poster-board display of family photos, along with a full-size souvenir sticker depicting the shuttle mission patch with pictures of the doomed astronauts.

In a commemorative Sun "front page" created by colleagues for his retirement two decades ago and also on display, Al's personal recollections of some events were included – and considering how much for granted we take space flight these days, this seems particularly poignant. He was telling about the launching of the first American into space, Alan Shepard, on May 5, 1961:

In those last 30 seconds of the countdown, all the details, all the briefings and all the other preparations were out of my mind. I must have stood like a statue looking at the Redstone, perhaps two miles away from the press site where the reporters had assembled to watch the lift-off.

There was a lump in my throat the size of an orange and I remember saying to myself, 'There's a man in that rocket.'... I was transfixed.

I also remember that launch. I was in 10th-grade music class at Baltimore City College, and listened to the live radio broadcast over the high school's PA system. For all the hullabaloo, Shepard's suborbital flight lasted just 15 minutes.

After his retirement, Al was contracted by The Sun to craft advance obituaries on notable Marylanders, arranging confidential interviews with most of his subjects just for that purpose.

In a compilation of selected and historic front pages titled “A Century in The Sun,” from which the Apollo 11 and Challenger accounts were obtained, the byline of Albert Sehlstedt Jr. is among the most represented – the last in the edition of Jan. 25, 1993, on the death of Justice Thurgood Marshall.

I’m not sure when Albert’s final byline appeared in the newspaper, but possibly it was in September 2005 on the obituary of Baltimore investment banker and TV-radio broadcast presence Julius Westheimer. I was the night metro editor that evening and, on very short notice, extensively updated and added material to the long-before-written obit. I had the honor of my byline appearing atop the story, next to Uncle Albert’s.

By then, Al was three years into his own decline from Alzheimer's disease, and he died Oct. 9 at the age of 86.

I’ll always treasure him.