Newspaper remembrance

Newsboys' remembrance gathering includes bench-sitters Fred Rasmussen (left) and Ernie Imhoff. (Photo by Jim Burger)

Newsboys killed in 1924

honored at gravesite

on disaster anniversary

Toasts, tears are offered for them

... and for those killed at the Annapolis Capital

Time has a way of defeating memory, but a small group of diehard newspaper folks have kept alive an annual remembrance for five teenage boys lost in a tragedy nearly a century ago when the Chesapeake Bay steamboat Three Rivers caught fire off Cove Point in southern Maryland.

The victims were among the 59 members of The Evening Sun Newsboys Band,returning from a performance on the bay steamer on the Fourth of July in 1924. Five adults also perished in the disaster.

The boys rest under a semicircle of gravestones flanked by stone benches, all facing a seven-foot-high granite memorial and copper sculpture in Baltimore's huge Loudon Park Cemetery -- also the gravesite, in another section, of the famed  Evening Sun writer H.L. Mencken.

For many years, the evening newspaper held a memorial service there for the boys, and the tradition was revived about 1994 by a group of staffers including its last managing editor, Ernest F. Imhoff. The Evening Sun itself formally died -- some say it was murdered -- in 1995, four years after its staff, operation and content were merged with the surviving morning Sun, leading to a rapid decline in circulation.

Ernie worked for decades at the evening paper, and was its city editor on a snowy winter night in 1969 when I, as a cub reporter for the then-competing morning  paper, was covering a massive church fire across the street from his home in Baltimore's Bolton Hill neighborhood. He invited me in from the cold, and offered a drink... brandy, as I recall.

I like to think of myself as an Evening Sun alum, despite having worked 40 years for the morning paper. I was acting night metro editor when, at the stroke of midnight one night in 1991, their staffs were officially wed. And I managed to get a few bylines on its front page during the final years of publication.

Now in his early 80s, his gait slowed enough to need a cane, Ernie is still presiding over the ceremony at Loudon Park, and was among 16 people who turned out at 9 a.m. today at the newsboys' burial site. It was also a family reunion, of sorts, because newspaper veterans have that kind of a bond -- dedication to their profession, and to each other. 

Dave Cohn calls out names of the newsboys, one headstone at a time. (Jim Burger photo)

There was news to share about the declining health of a colleague unable to attend, and lament for others who have died in the past year. There were toasts with whiskey and rye (and cold bottles of water for the few nondrinkers), and a reading by retired Evening Sun copy desk chief Dave Cohn of part of the newsboys' story.

It included the names of the dead, recited as Dave walked from headstone to headstone: Walter Clark Millikin and Thomas Ashby Pilker Jr., both age 13; Lester Alfred Seligman and Vernon Edward Jefferson, both 15; and the oldest of them, Nelson Appleton Miles, 17.

They were among the army of kids in that far-gone era who delivered the news.

Rasmussen and Joan Jacobson offer comfort as Ernie Imhoff speaks of the Annapolis Capital victims. (Jim Burger photo)

Ernie, tears welling up in his eyes, said their names should never be forgotten -- nor should those of the five others who were killed last week when a crazy man with a grudge opened fire with a shotgun at the Annapolis Capital, which is owned by the Baltimore Sun.

They were Rob Hiaasen, 59, assistant managing editor and former Sun reporter; Wendi Winters, 65, community reporter and special publications editor; Gerald Fischman, 61, editorial page editor; John McNamara, 56, staff writer and longtime sports reporter; and Rebecca Smith, 34, a sales assistant hired just eight months ago.

They, too, delivered the news.

Perhaps someday there will be a memorial place for all of them as well, in addition to the one in our hearts.

About 500 people attended a life celebration for Annapolis Capital shooting victim Rob Hiaasen Monday evening, and services for the other four are scheduled for this week and next. (Panorama photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Road Trip Report, Part 6 (Healing after Horror)

A semicircle of 'Hokie Stones' is heart of memorial at Virginia Tech. Other image shows Barbara Lockee (left) of VT and Rhonda Robinson of Northern Illinois University. (photos by Bonnie Schupp)

Project in healing, hope

unites schools hit by shootings

You can’t visit Virginia Tech without noting what happened here on the leafy Blacksburg, Va., campus some 18 months ago.

Virginia Tech was host school to this weekend’s annual conference of the International Visual Literacy Association, which included an exhibit Saturday on a project in its early stages of development aimed at bringing together VT and Northern Illinois University in their common bond of grief and recovery from mass killings.

On April 16, 2007, a deranged student killed 32 people and wounded a reported 17 others on the Blacksburg campus in two separate attacks before taking his own life. It was the deadliest mass murder in United States history.

It was followed on Feb. 14 of this year by a mass shooting by a former student at Northern Illinois University who killed five and wounded 18 others in a large lecture hall on the DeKalb campus and then committed suicide.

I guess you can’t define two such incidents, coming 10 months apart, as a pattern. Yet they are part of a troubling history in a nation where violence is a daily reality, and multiple killings are not uncommon. We are inundated with violence, in both the news and what is termed entertainment.

How to cope, how to assuage the grief, to embark on a path toward healing are at the root of the project shown in a formative stage Saturday by faculty members Rhonda Robinson of Northern Illinois and Barbara Lockee of Virginia Tech. They titled the presentation – photos of the grieving, memorial displays and expressions of caring – “Symbols of Hope: Huskie and Hokie Visions of Recovery.”

With photographs taken on both campuses in the days and weeks after the killings, the effort builds a bridge of empathy between schools 700 miles apart but drawn close in spirit by the horrors they suffered.

Robinson and Lockee said they plan to seek contributions of images from their university communities that will enlarge the scope of the project, whose final form is yet undetermined.

Lockee led a walking tour from the conference center to Virginia Tech’s eloquent April 16 Memorial – a semicircle of 32 “Hokie Stones” (the type of stone incorporated in buildings across the sprawling campus), each engraved with the name of a victim of the massacre. It is modeled on an impromptu memorial of stones assembled by a student volunteer group hours after the shootings.

As we arrived, other visitors were placing fresh flowers across the name on each stone.

There’s a brochure explaining the memorial, with photos and short biographies of the 32 victims in the same order they appear, from left to right, in the procession of stones.

Walking along the path, you inevitably take a deep breath at the stunning reality: “There’s so many of them.”

But there were 33 dead, and one remains missing: The killer.

Perhaps that’s because he may be the hardest to forget.

Nearby, tucked around the corner of the administration building, is Norris Hall, where the bulk of the killings occurred in second-floor classrooms. While there was some thought to demolishing it, Lockee said much work would have been lost because of equipment installed in first-floor laboratories that could not be moved.

Instead, walls are coming down on the second floor to create space for a new Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies. It is to be directed, Lockee said, by Jerzy Nowak, the horticulture professor and department chair whose wife, French professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, was killed in Room 211 along with 11 of her students.

Stitches across time

The ‘Visions of Recovery’ exhibit was paired with a display by Lucinda Willis of “healing quilts” – family heirlooms and her own, each laced with deep meaning.

In a summary of her exhibit, “Healing Quilts: A Visual Display of Emotions and Strength,” Willis explained: “Healing quilts have, for generations, been a way for women to express themselves when recovering from a devastating episode in life. Various forms of healing quilts have been created over the centuries, and even today, quilts are made which gently show strength and determination in the face of adversity.”

Many have seen quilts memorializing victims of disease, war or violence. The display of five quilts brought to the conference by Willis, of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, included one that, according to the story handed down with it across generations, was hastily made with available scrap fabric by a mother to keep her son safe and warm as he went off to war as a Confederate soldier. It and he survived.

Of the designs that emerge, Willis wrote on a display card, “Healing quilts don’t get planned, they evolve, and with each stitch, some comfort is gained.”