Those spirit-draining words came from Lt. Sean Smith, the new temporary PIO for the Gwinnett County Sheriff.  We were at the Gwinnett County jail, which was holding inmate Victor Hill.  Hill, a former sheriff, had been arrested following a public corruption indictment.

Sometime this summer: The writer with Mr. Winne

Every local media goon and their brother had requested a jailhouse interview with Hill, myself included.  Hill had a colorful history.  He’d been a bit unorthodox, shall we say, when he was sheriff.  He lost re-election and has been running to regain his seat in 2012′s election.

Why he would agree to talk solely to the WSB reporter was beyond my understanding.  Sure, Winne’s a fine reporter for whom I have much love and mad respect.  And sure, Atlanta’s TV viewership misguidedly turns to WSB in droves for its local news. Hill would have had a substantial audience by giving Winne the exclusive.

I didn’t expect Hill to say anything particularly interesting in a jailhouse interview.  But I still wanted the video image of the former lawman dressed in a prison uniform, predictably professing his innocence.

And I didn’t want to see it on WSB without seeing it on WXIA.

Unfortunately, Hill’s attorney was complicit in the arrangement.  When he walked into the lobby, he was highly agitated from a sleepless effort to post bond for Hill, and adamant that he speak only to Winne.  When asked why, he wouldn’t / couldn’t explain it.

My options were limited:  Credit Winne with a “win,” and watch him traipse into the jail for an exclusive; or try to do something about it.   I only had one choice:  I had to gripe.  Like you, I hate whiners.  But I also hate getting my ass kicked by a competitor — especially when I’m on the property, watching it happen.

Fortunately, Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway was answering his phone at just the right moment.  Hill is only going to talk to Winne, Conway reiterated.  I don’t have much say in it.

Conway knew there were reporters from four Atlanta TV stations in his parking lot.  I couldn’t plausibly argue to replace Winne as the exclusive agent of Hill’s utterances.  But Conway has a good relationship with local media.  I appealed to his sense of fairness.  Without saying it explicitly — because I didn’t want to back him into a corner — I was asking:  Who’s in charge at your jail?  Victor Hill, or you?

I proposed an unorthodox compromise:  Agree to Hill’s request to only talk to Winne, but let TV cameras from the other stations record the interview.

Do what, now? 

Let Winne ask the questions, I said.  That gives Hill what he wants.  But don’t allow the interview unless everybody gets to record it.

Conway hung up.  Shortly thereafter, the PIO was telling the assembled media that they’d get a chance to record Winne’s interview.  Winne reacted only by engaging the PIO in a hushed conversation afterward.

Minutes later, the PIO escorted Hill’s attorney, plus Winne and his photographer, past the security checkpoint and into the jail.  Hill had to agree to the arrangement, Lt. Smith said.  If he doesn’t, then we’ll escort WSB back out emptyhanded.

This was a worrisome moment.  Winne was back in the jail with Victor Hill and no other news media.  He was one “REC” button click away from the exclusive I’d tried to undo.   Winne is a wily guy.  If anybody could bamboozle an inexperienced PIO, it was Winne.

A long fifteen minutes or so passed.

Then Lt. Smith reappeared in the lobby.  The cameras can go back, he told Winne’s competitors.  The reporters have to stay in the lobby.

Aungelique Proctor and I sat in the lobby.  We chatted about our children and looked at our wristwatches.

Mark Winne was the only reporter allowed in to ask him questions, intoned Justin Farmer as he led into Winne’s 5pm live shot.  Winne had gotten his exclusive, in a manner of speaking.

But my day turned out just fine.

They were doing a piece on some Mitt Romney supporters whose over-the-top enthusiasm for the milquetoast Republican seemed newsworthy when I did the piece in November.  One of them, Joe McCutchen, told me Politico had picked up the story (though I can’t find it), which caught The Daily Show’s eye.

Oren Briner (far left), with Joe McCutchen and Al Madrigal

I’m not a big fan of movie-crews-in-our-little-town stories.  But I do like The Daily Show.  The shoot was topical and interesting.  The story would have  ample layers of comedic potential.

McCutchen blessed our presence at the shoot.  So did Oscar Poole, whose barbecue restaurant would host a portion of the Daily Show shoot.  I did not call Comedy Central to get their permission, figuring it would simply give them an opportunity to invite us to stay the hell away.

I figured our presence there could be a source of some conflict, and wanted to minimize it.  I was mindful of the fact that they had set up this shoot.  But Poole had told me the restaurant would be open to the public during the shoot.  This wouldn’t be a closed set.  Mike Zakel and I went and resolved to be respectful of the Daily Show crew.

The conflicts were minimal but amusing.

Producer Oren Brimer arrived at about 1pm and seemed unalarmed when he saw Zakel’s camera on a tripod, wedged discreetly into a notch near a cash register.  McCutchen said he had forewarned the Daily Show crew of our presence.  Zakel introduced himself first.  The response was friendly.

We had already interviewed McCutchen and some other Romney-supporting patrons (Poole was out of state; I’d gotten his permission by phone the previous day).   The Daily Show shoot was an hour behind schedule.  We were anxious to get what we needed and drive back to Atlanta to produce the piece for the 7pm news.  I told Brimer that it wouldn’t take us long to get what we needed and be gone.

However, the crew (two photogs, an audio tech, and correspondent Al Madrigal, who was making his Daily Show debut as a field correspondent with the Ellijay piece) was hungry and intended to order lunch before resuming the shoot.   Brimer had never heard of Brunswick stew.  I described it to him as “basically meat soup.”  He ordered a bowl of it, plus beef ribs.

Brimer was tall, good humored and barely 35, if that.  When I asked him if I could ask him a question for my story (I try to avoid the word “interview” because it sounds nearly synonymous with “interrogate”), he agreeably said:  Sure.  What questions do you want to ask?

I should have responded by answering the question:  I want to ask you why you’re here, and about your approach to the story.

That would have been easy.

Instead I said:  Did you tell Joe McCutchen what questions you would ask him before you interviewed him?  The crew had just finished an interview with McCutchen that McCutchen said had lasted three hours.

Zakel and Richards use their persuasive powers. Photo by George Winn

Fair enough, Brimer said.  Ask away.

I said: OK.  Let me clip this mic on you.

Then Brimer got nervous:  Wait.  Whoa.  We’re just here to eat lunch.  Maybe we could do this later.  He started to turn away, but turned back as I reminded him that we were trying not to linger.  Plus, lunch wasn’t ready yet.  He became agreeable again.  I clipped the mic on him.  The on-camera chat lasted maybe two minutes.

As lunch concluded, the crew turned toward their gear.  Then Brimer unexpectedly told Zakel that he couldn’t shoot them.

He turned to me and repeated it:  We can’t let you shoot us shooting.  We have to keep our methods confidential, he said.

Your “methods?”  I pondered a diplomatic response.

“I can see by your face that this isn’t agreeable to you,” he said to me.  “What’s the problem?  Because we’ll have to shut down the shoot if you insist on shooting us.”

It appeared he was yielding to an instinct which I fully expected:  We’re a big time TV show with a national audience.  You’re local news.  Bug off.  Yet he remained good-natured, even as he indulged the ill-considered Diva instinct.  He could have thrown a fit and and recruited McCutchen and the restaurant management to force us to leave.  To his credit, he didn’t.

He also quickly realized he was backing himself into a corner.  Rather than start an argument– which was tempting–  I gently reminded him that our needs were minimal and our desire to finish and depart was considerable.  We shared a goal here, I suggested.

We came to an understanding.  He blocked out and shot Madrigal and McCutchen walking into the dining room.  We shot it too.  The scene continued for two or three minutes.  For our 90 second piece, it provided ample cameras-on-location footage.  “Got what you need?” Brimer asked me.  I nodded and thanked him.

We got out, and retained our respect for the Daily Show.   They regained control of their set.  Everybody wins.

When asked when the piece would air, Brimer gave two answers.  “Our goal is to air it before the South Carolina primary (which is January 21).”   He also said they were shooting for Thursday January 19.

Even on the phone, gesturing comes naturally (left).  Ben took this photo in our newsroom while observing me in the throes of a heated phone chat with a brain-dead public information officer person.

Gesturing on TV is different.  If the material is unscripted, then gestures naturally accompany the words.  When reading a script or a teleprompter, then gesturing can be affected and unnatural.

About twenty years ago, I began to take note of some very earnest gesturing by ‘prompter-reading news anchors.  (Perhaps they’d done it before, but that’s when I noticed.)  Even when their image appeared on TV only from the neck up, the gestures would fly off camera:  Arms waving, hands chopping, fingers pointing.

Though the arms typically didn’t appear on camera, they let fly anyway.  One suspects that talent coaches advised them to gesture because it added energy to their from-the-neck-up presence.

At WXIA, reporters in-studio tend to be shown on-camera from the waist up.  The wider shot is a blessing and a curse.  It’s a blessing in that it reduces the need for makeup; it’s a curse because body language becomes an essential part of communication.  Typically, we read from ‘prompters in the studio.  This means that the body language becomes part of a script.

I have yet to master the art of scripting body language.

The piece below classically exposes this shortcoming.  I dashed out this piece within a few minutes on a Thursday afternoon, loaded it into a ‘prompter page, then went into the studio moments later to perform it.  Though I was familiar with the material, I’d failed to read it out loud prior to reading it on camera.

After the recording began, I read the first line and realized I hadn’t gestured.  As I started reading the second line, I threw out a gratuitous arm-wave at the start, emphasizing “the picks” instead of “the news professionals,” as I should have done.

Then came a list of stories, each with a hand gesture.  With some prior thought, I might have flailed less and done the classic two-handed finger-count, with the forefinger of the left hand touching successive extended fingers on the right.

About 35 seconds into the piece, my gestures began to get into sync with my copy.  “Act naturally,” as Buck Owens sang in the early 1960s.  It’s not as easy as it looks.

Richard Crabbe, Summer 2011, Krog St. NE

Richard Crabbe’s retirement was a bittersweet moment. Viewed selfishly, it irritated me because he is such a talented photographer and editor. Such folk can make my stories look great and make me look like I actually know what I’m doing.

Viewed through the evolution of the TV news business, it makes more sense.  Crabbe spent three decades at WXIA.  During the first half of his career there, the station had developed a strong reputation for storytelling and news video.  But the last decade was rough for Crabbe and other veteran photographers.  As Gannett’s fortunes stumbled with the decline of the newspaper industry, WXIA shrunk its staff with buyouts; it furloughed staff in 2008.  Photographers lost a valuable perk when they were no longer allowed to take home news vehicles.

In the last two years, WXIA has updated some of its technology and added staff.  It seems to have built an identity as a news operation (flattered by the occasional cross-town copycat). The storytelling is still strong, and the newsgathering staff is slowly expanding again.

But one cannot overstate how tough it’s been to endure the last 15 years or so at WXIA, which has (by my reckoning) gone through more news directors during that period than WAGA and WSB (and WGCL too, maybe) combined.

Given a sometimes head-spinning absence of stability, one can see why a guy like Crabbe might favorably view an earlier, rather than later retirement.

As he told folks who attended his sendoff, Crabbe was also motivated to retire while still at the top of his game.  Though approaching his mid-60s, he was still physically able to handle the demands of schlepping gear and gunning through breaking news (his coverage of the Fulton County Courthouse shootings in 2005 was pretty much unmatched).

He also embraced technology as a much younger man might.  Crabbe frequently brought his personal Macbook to work, which he used for its Photoshop program, among other things.  When WXIA updated its editing program in 2010, Crabbe immediately mastered it.  Nobody in the building could create quality graphics as quickly as Crabbe did.

Crabbe's last day at work

He had a personal standard for his own work that the entire staff appreciated.   Photogs would say that Crabbe was the guy who set the standard that made WXIA the best news video shop in Atlanta in the 80s and 90s.  Fortunately, many of that standard’s adherents are still on staff.

Crabbe said that he wanted to exit before his skills deteriorated, before he was unable to live up to his own standards.

I respect that.  But damn.  I’m still sorry to see him go.

Crabbe’s retirement spurred a reunion of old-school WXIA folks.  Click here to see a photo gallery.

Happy holidays.  Here’s my gift to you.  I’m going to admit that a competitor kicked my ass on a story.

This will be a bit of heresy.  Getting one’s ass kicked on a story isn’t something TV reporters enjoy discussing.  Just the opposite actually.  If somebody beats you on a story, you cling to the hope that nobody notices.  Viewers almost certainly won’t notice — because, quaintly, they’re either watching my TV station or yours, in all likelihood.  But not both.

But newsroom folks will notice because they tend to click amongst TV channels, or watch the wall with four monitors playing four TV stations at the same time.

The worst, of course, is when one of your own supervisors notices.  This happened periodically at a previous employer, where my supervisors obsessively watched WSB’s newscasts instead of the newscasts on their own station.  In fact, they would frequently see an element they liked in a WSB story — and automatically assume that we overlooked it.  We’d have to explain:  Hey– we had that element, and more!  Watch your own TV station, for cryin’ out loud.

I don’t know if my previous employer is still that way.  I’ve heard they’re still obsessed with WSB, but are less scornful of their own staff these days.  I hope that’s right.

I digress.  It’s the egg nog typing.

Not only did WGCL kick my ass, but they did it on a feature story.  In other words, it was a story that was more cute than competitive.  Or so I thought.

The story was about a guy who fired his shotgun into some trees at North DeKalb Mall in order to harvest some mistletoe, the kissy-face Christmas season fungus that grows in treetops.  The cops caught him and he went to jail.

I learned that such practice is commonplace in rural areas.  This gave the story a bizarre touch I found appealing.  I wanted to explore the practice.  Richard Crabbe and I spent all day compiling video elements to tell the story with a bit of flair, or so I hoped.

Mike Paluska, WGCL

My first stop was at the guy’s house.  There, I saw WGCL’s Mike Paluska sitting in a marked car.    Paluska cheerfully informed me the guy wasn’t home.   I’d heard elsewhere he was still in jail.  The house looked empty, but I did the perfunctory knock on the door and nobody answered.  We both drove off and I never saw Paluska again.

Crabbe and I then drove from the guy’s house to the mall; to a Big John’s Christmas tree store that sold mistletoe; to a shooting range; and to the DeKalb police department, where spokeswoman Mekka Parish agreed to answer my silly questions about this holiday tradition.  Including lunch, it killed several hours.

Meantime, Paluska apparently single-mindedly focused on the mistletoe gunman’s house.  Smart guy.

A one-man-band, it appeared Paluska encountered 66-year old Bill Robinson at his house at some point during the day.  Paluska rolled while Robinson described and then justified what he did.  Robinson was animated and colorful.  Paluska’s story gave WGCL’s viewers a lovely first-person journey into the mind of a guy who would shoot mistletoe out of treetops at an urban shopping mall.

Absent the actual gunman, my story (below) was much more of a smoke-and-mirrors effort, dressed up with gunfire and fringe characters.

I saw Paluska’s story on a monitor across the newsroom as Crabbe was finishing editing our piece.  My heart sank.  Nobody else in our newsroom noticed.  Or if they did, they were gracious enough to keep it to themselves.

The next day, I blandly suggested a follow-up.  “The mistletoe guy might talk to us,” I said vaguely in the morning meeting.  The consensus was that this story had gotten sufficient attention already, and I covered something else.  Nobody mentioned our competitors’ treatment of the story, especially me.  Until now.

Perhaps this confessional will go toward saving my tortured and occasionally misdirected soul.  It seems appropriate for this particular season.

Here’s wishing Merry Christmas to TV’s Mike Paluska.  I’ll get you next time.

And Merry Christmas to Richard Crabbe, who retired last week.  I’m gonna miss that guy.  A post is in the works.

Jorelys Rivera

The disappearance and murder of seven year old Jorelys Rivera was undeniably awful.   Most news folk are able to detach themselves emotionally from stories they cover, in part because they’ve frequently seen similar stories before.  But thankfully, children are rarely murdered in metro Atlanta nowadays.  That made this story rough.

My career in Atlanta started after Wayne Williams was convicted in the Atlanta child murders cases.  In my first two years here, I covered the murders of two children and never forgot their names.

10-year old Amy Holman was abducted, sexually assaulted and strangled in Hall County in 1987.  A sheriff’s deputy who lived nearby was convicted of the crime.

Bricola Coleman was 12.  Her mother found her body in their SW Atlanta apartment in 1988.   An intense police search for the killer produced a suspect, but the charges were finally dropped in 2000.  The child’s killer remains at large.  (Both cases deserve more than the scant six sentences I’ve given them.  Sadly, I can’t find either victim’s photo on the internet.)

Both cases gnawed at me, just as I knew the Rivera case gnawed at the reporters (and the police investigators) covering this case.  I only produced sidebar pieces on the Rivera case and wasn’t part of the media siege at the Canton apartment complex where Jorelys and her alleged killer lived.

WXIA’s Jaye Watson was what she calls “a supporting player” covering the Rivera case.  Duffie Dixon, Kevin Rowson, Blayne Alexander, Jon Shirek and Jennifer Leslie did most of the heavy lifting — as well as photogs Mike Zakel, Charles Olmstead, Tyson Paul and others.  I asked Watson to write the following.

++

In the 12 years I’d been in Atlanta, I couldn’t recall something like this, a story that epitomizes my worst nightmare as a mother. I pictured it:  A sunny day, a playground, the laughter of children. And there in the shadows lurked a real-life monster, about to pick a child to torture and kill.

We camped out at the apartment complex, talking to neighbors, most of whom were already pointing to Ryan Brunn,  People said he put off a ‘bad vibe,’ that he was weird and didn’t look people in the eye, that nobody knew him well and he hadn’t been there very long. I challenged them. I pointed out that it’s easy to call someone weird or ‘off’ once you’ve seen GBI agents in their apartment, towing away their car. They said no, everyone thought he was weird before that.

Jennifer "Jaye Watson" Hamilton, with Jude, Iris and husband Kenny

Later in the week,  I had a rather heated exchange with someone in my neighborhood who said it was the mother’s fault for not supervising Jorelys – that she was an awful mother.  I don’t know anything about Jorelys’s mother, except that she works the overnight shift at a factory, and that she is raising three kids.  We were told a teenager in the complex was babysitting when this happened.

I saw some of my Facebook friends slamming the mother early on, and all I could think was:  This is what we do as humans.  We try to blame the mother to reassure ourselves that something this heinous will never happen to our children.

I’m a mother.  The night Jorelys’ body was found, I went home to my children. I held my almost seven year old son on the couch as he watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  I felt the lightness of his little body as he sank back against my chest, I looked at his slender arms, his tiny boy torso with its bony ribcage, and I imagined it. I let myself imagine the terror and confusion Jorelys felt, how she wished for her mother, for someone to save her, and how help never came.

I imagined my son or my daughter enduring the same fate as Jorelys, and I felt sickened. I felt terrified. Because I’m not always there. I work. I have a wonderful babysitter. But no one can watch every second of every day, forever. And it was in one of those tiny cracks of time that an innocent girl was abducted and murdered.

I stood outside the Cherokee County Detention Center Friday morning, reporting the latest on the case.  As reporters, we see, not through the TV screen but with our own eyes, the last place Jorelys played, the home she used to live in.  We meet the friends she used to know. And while I know how to use sound and images to structure a TV story, I have no idea how to make sense of what happened to a 7 year old girl who deserved what my children have — love, safety, a home.

Instead, Jorelys suffered and was alone with a monster at the end of her short life. Regardless of the judicial system, it’s hard for me to feel that there can ever be any true justice for the destruction of innocence.

Gloria and Herman Cain Saturday

Herman Cain ended his campaign for president Saturday.  I attended the speech he delivered announcing his exit, and heard the crowd roar loudest when he denounced the news media.

The news media is a convenient object of scorn.  It’s easy to clobber reporters, whose jobs are to look for and tell interesting real-life stories.  Frequently, those stories are salacious — especially when the key players are celebrities.  The audience eats up the stories, while at the same time denouncing the whole business as smarmy.

It would have been much more uncomfortable for Cain to address the particular allegations of the small parade of women who reported untoward personal encounters with Cain, particularly in front of a large group of supporters.  And with Gloria Cain standing in the wings.  “So what if I didn’t tell my wife about my secret 13-year friendship with a single woman, which included generous financial assistance and 4:30am text messages?” Cain could have said.

Instead, the crowd roared at the lines bashing the media.  In interviews afterward, Cain supporters expressed anger at the news media for undoing their candidate.

A woman gave away these buttons at the Cain event

He bitterly attacked “professional scavengers and gossip mongers who have made life hell for innocent people.” An hour later, he went on a local radio talk show and called reporters “vultures and hooligans.”

The above line comes from a 1987  article about Julian Bond, following allegations the former Georgia legislator habitually used cocaine.  The allegations came from his estranged wife Alice.

Bond was and still is an outspoken liberal.  The same guy who broke the story about Herman Cain’s alleged mistress also broke the Alice Bond story.  I honestly don’t know Dale Russell’s political leanings.  But he’s an equal-opportunity pain-in-the-ass to powerful people prone to excess.  Ask Terrell Bolton.  Ask Earl Paulk.  Ask Glenn Richardson.

Donna Rice and Gary Hart share a moment, circa 1987

The rest of the news media are similarly motivated.  We’ll chase a good story, regardless of the political bent of the target.  Since the term became vogue, the “liberal media” has a rich history of clobbering liberals, from Gary Hart to Elliott Spitzer to Anthony Weiner.  Their salacious behavior demanded it.  Hart has probably experienced many flashbacks during the past month.

Thankfully, you don’t hear about the “liberal media” much anymore.  There were “don’t believe the liberal media!” signs and buttons distributed at the Cain event.  It seemed like a throwback to the 90s.

Cain supporters can argue that the string of allegations against Cain were nebulous and unproven.  They can argue that the news media, whose 24 hour presence magnifies the most meaningless stories, gave the allegations undue attention.  They can decry “spin,” though I think that’s merely a pejorative term for the free expression of ideas you don’t like.

The news media is an almost textbook example of a free market entity.  When critics demand reform of the news media and its priorities, they rarely offer an alternative framework.  “Would you rather have the government control the news media?” I’ll occasionally ask them.  “No, but…” the response will invariably begin.

The media is your savior when reporters find dirt on the guy you don’t like.  When your enemy is exposed as a scoundrel, you will happily “spin” the material to suit you.  You might even praise the news media for doing its job.

But when your guy is the target, the media becomes a convenient whipping boy.  It’s much easier than discussing the facts.

Mom, Mrs. LAF, Jimmy, Rosalyn, Clint and Doug

Odds are, you haven’t been to Plains, GA on a Sunday morning when Jimmy Carter is teaching Sunday school.   Maybe you’ve considered it but have always had something better to do on a Saturday night / Sunday morning.

The trek has gnawed at me for much of the last twenty years.  I’d see the 39th president on TV, or see his grandson at the Capitol, and the prospect of a Sunday school visit would briefly flash in my mind, then recede.  We finally did it this weekend.

The impetus came from Mrs. LAF, who encountered Bill Clinton at a book signing this month and kinda dug it.  “We can go see Jimmy Carter pretty much any Sunday,” I told her.  I went to the Carter NPS site, which linked to his church’s site.  The Maranatha Baptist Church faithfully posts Carter’s Sunday school teaching schedule, often weeks in advance.

My mom was in town for Thanksgiving.  Mom loves Jesus and voted for Carter.  The plans were laid.

I’m often struck by longtime Georgians — and by people in the news biz — who overlook the amazing things about Georgia.  Odds are, you’ve never been to the Okefenokee Swamp.   Most people I ask haven’t.  It’s a uniquely breathtaking locale.  But it’s in the middle of nowhere, and the whole alligator thing freaks people out.

Likewise, it’s easy to underappreciate Georgia fixtures like Carter.  Some Georgians loathe him, still.  I’ve chatted with him on-camera several times.  He’s easy to take for granted.  Why make the trip to watch the guy teach Sunday school?  Like the Okefenokee, Plains is kind of in the middle of nowhere, and the whole Baptist Church thing freaks some people out.

the Windsor, Americus GA

We stayed at the Windsor Hotel.  The Windsor is remarkable, a fully restored antiquity that dominates downtown Americus.  I don’t know of another hotel in the state — including Savannah — that’s like it.  The lobby is ancient and breathtaking.  Our rooms had twelve-foot ceilings, walk-in closets and cost a hundred bucks each.

We showed up at church at about 8:45 am, fifteen minutes after the doors opened.  A dog sniffed our car upon entering the parking lot.  Secret Service agents casually wanded us at the front door.  We took seats in the fourth row.  Another row filled behind us by the time Sunday school started.

At 9:45, a woman entered the sanctuary and gave an amusing take on the ground rules.  Photos were allowed at certain times.  He is “Mr. Carter” or “President Carter” but not “Mr. President.”  Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter would take photos afterward, but you had to stick around for the hour-long church service that followed Sunday school.

Mrs. LAF insisted on watching from an overflow room with a TV so that she could also watch our one-year-old.  While backstage, Clint kept toddling into the Carters and their security detail.  Mr. Carter made eyes at the boy and cooed at him several times.

Wearing a bolo tie and sport coat, Carter began by referring to the book of Hebrews.  He talked about a little-known bit of Jesus lore rooted in Hebrews 1:2– that Christ was present at the Creation.

His lesson veered between the teachings of Jesus and the work of the Carter Center, and a story or two from his presidency.  He knew his audience — much of which was very versed in the New Testament, but were also politically-minded.

The closest he came to talking about politics was when he referred to 1 Corinthians 1:10, where Paul beseeches Christians that “there be no divisions among you.”

the program

“I may disagree with some of you about homosexuality or abortion” Carter said, while saying that followers of Christ could stay united in their faith.  Carter did not elaborate on his positions on those secular topics.

It was an entirely nonpartisan lesson, with matter-of-fact references to Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and the upcoming elections in Egypt and the Congo.  It sounded like he referred to his wife as “Rosa,” though here may have been a silent “n” at the end, kinda like military folks call sergeants “sarn’t.”

My wife and mother sat through the church service afterward while I played with Clint in the nursery and on the swing set behind the church.

The 11am service ended promptly at noon.  The Carters took a side exit and stood within a rope line outside.  As the parishoners and tourists exited the front door, the woman who laid out the ground rules hurried them toward the rope line.  There, the Carters posed for photos with everybody who wanted one.  The ground rules included no handshakes and no autographs.  A volunteer used our camera, and shot a much-too-wide photo of our group.  The above photo is cropped.

Neither Carter appeared to recognize yours truly as part of the Atlanta local news rabble.  Our only conversation during the photo op was about Clint’s age.  I thanked him for the Sunday school lesson.

It was a life experience.  I recommend it.  Do it while the Carters are still young.

It’s also a a pretty brilliant way to spread the Word.  Carter is an unabashed evangelical.  How many of us actually remember the Biblical chapters and verses cited during Sunday school lessons?

Or write about them in secular blogs?

When young people enter the TV news business, they often do so for two reasons:  They desire a career that spontaneously puts them in strange situations on tight deadlines.  And, they want to see their pretty faces on TV and make lots of money as a big-time TV personality or whatever.

The spontaneity aspect of our industry is a given.  In fact, it’s so prevalent that veteran reporters (particularly with young families) often curse the very thing that drove them into it.  Events and assignments control the workday of the News Professional.  And after years of 6pm live shots in faraway locales on the fringe of their viewing areas, they crave predictability.  They want to know they’ll be home at a reasonable time that night.  At the very least, they want to exercise a measure of control over their work days.

Paying homage: Duffie Dixon, WXIA

Thanksgiving anchors a week that can provide that elusive predictability, as outlined in the above Suspicious Package piece.  The Thanksgiving Trifecta refers to three stories that Atlanta TV covers unfailingly, year after year, during Thanksgiving week.  You already know which stories they are; if you need your memory refreshed, click “play.”

My favorite part of the piece is the cameo appearance by Duffie Dixon, shot by yours truly with an Iphone — and it goes to the “pretty face” part of what motivates newcomers to the TV news biz.

I told her I was going to introduce her by dead rolling the video into her spoken portion of the piece– so she would appear on camera for a few seconds before speaking.

She responded with an ironic tribute to The Nod, the seemingly involuntary head-bob that nearly every reporter produces upon hearing their name in the earpiece while awaiting the completion of an anchor toss during a live shot.

While watching local news, it’s fun to watch for The Nod.   Some reporters exaggerate it with great flourish and importance.  A casual viewer could turn it into a game, rating the nods on various newscasts with a 1-10 scale.  My current favorite is the furrowed-brow neck-twist, perfected by Aasif Mandvi on the Daily Show.  In the past, my nod has tended to lean toward a lone arched eyebrow; lately it’s evolved into a last-minute eyeglass adjustment.

It’s another predictable element in an industry that draws newcomers looking for careers defined by spontaneity.

This month, I started packing my winter overcoat to work.  I’ve been wearing the same coat to work for 23 years.  45 seconds into the above video, you’ll see the coat on a much-younger version of yours truly in 1991.  Jeff Hullinger, Brenda Wood and Bill Hartman are also in it.  I’m pretty sure they’ve changed out their overcoats since then.

I continue to wear the coat for several reasons.

Pete, Steve, EC (in a coat like mine) and Bruce

1) I like its style.  WXIA photog Al Ashe identifies it as a Donegal Tweed.  Whatever it’s called, I don’t think I’ve ever seen another one like it (with one significant exception:  On Elvis Costello on the cover of Get Happy! album, and inside sleeve of Taking Liberties).

About every other winter, a stranger will gaze at the coat and proclaim it awesome.  Usually, the admirer is an older gay man.  Otherwise, its style mostly goes unnoticed.

2)  It’s got a family history.  The coat was tailor-made for my step-grandfather, Charles R. Leick.  He married my grandmother Juanita while my mother was a teenager.  They lived in the Missouri Ozarks, and I frequently stayed with them for weeks at a time — doing chores on their cattle farm, and helping my grandfather get elected Magistrate Judge in 1978 in Crawford County.  One day in 1988, I fished the coat out of a cedar closet in the attic of their farmhouse in Davisville.  He told me he’d rarely worn the coat during the previous quarter-century and gave it to me on the spot.

3)  It’s a link to history.  A label inside the coat shows that it was tailor-made in  August 1963 by a Philadelphia clothier called White and Co.  Aside from that unhappy Dealey Plaza business in Dallas, 1963 was still an interesting year.

• George Wallace became Governor of Alabama;
• Betty Friedan jump-started feminism with The Feminine Mystique and the USSR put a woman in space;
• Patsy Cline died in a plane crash;
• The Beatles appear on record for the first time;
• Instant replay aired for the first time during a sporting event;
• Bull Connor’s cops fire-hosed protesters during the Birmingham campaign, and racist killers bombed the 16th St. Church;
• The US Post Office introduced ZIP codes;
• Lots of crazy shit happened in South Vietnam, culminating with the CIA-backed assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem;
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech.

3)  It’s still a rock-solid coat.  Its structural integrity is sound.  Except for the liner — which I’ve replaced a few times — nothing on the coat has frayed or even worn, except for the labels.   It’s warm.  And now, it’s “vintage.”

In the Suspicious Package segment below, I clunkily turn the old coat into a parable for the worthiness of old things — like TV reporters — that still work well.  “Like the man who wears it, the old coat still works fine.  I see no reason to trade it in for a newer, fresher, less weathered model” I intone, while gratefully accepting the assistance of Blayne Alexander, a newer, fresher, less weathered reporter.

The video is worth watching for her punch line at the end.