O, Captain, My Captain

When I was in college, it was my honor to study reporting under a professor who truly lived the adage that journalism is the first draft of history.

His name was Roy Reed, and he once worked for the New York Times; in fact, he was there when the landmark Times v. Sullivan decision was rendered, and he enthralled us in class with stories of that time. He also worked for the Arkansas Gazette before becoming a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas.

He was on the front lines of history in the 20th century.

He covered Orval Faubus at the Gazette. In the Times job he covered the civil rights movement in the South of the 1960s.

I will always remember the stories he told in class about covering marches that were led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — and how he feared for his life when he and the rest of the reporters came under the hate–filled glares of the whites who watched the marches from the sidewalks of sleepy Southern towns.

The folks at the Times didn't think that was hazardous enough, I suppose, so they sent Roy to Northern Ireland to cover the Protestants and the Catholics.

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After doing that for awhile, life in Fayetteville must have seemed positively placid by comparison. I never saw anyone as completely happy as Roy was when I was enrolled in his class. He had lived a life to which many — myself included — aspired, and he told us all about it — the good, the bad and the ugly. He was paying it forward, as they say today, sharing the things he had learned in a lifetime in the profession with the next generation.

He didn't give away A's in his class. You had to earn them. And it has always been a source of pride for me that I earned an A in Roy's reporting class. It isn't exactly the kind of thing you can put on a resume. But I'm proud of it, and I carry it with me.

Roy had an aneurysm yesterday and died at the age of 87.

As I understand the sequence of events, he lapsed into a coma on Saturday and was kept alive for a time, but life support was removed today and he passed away.

Roy's life was all about communication and information — so it was fitting that it was through social media, which didn't exist when I was in Roy's class but is the method for spreading information in the 21st century, that I learned of his death. There is a Facebook page where my friends and former colleagues post news of interest, and the tributes to Roy have been pouring in over there.

We all have our own memories of Roy. For me, there are too many to count, but one stands out. I was in his class in an election year, and he recruited several of us to do volunteer work at the county courthouse on Election Night. I suppose many, if not all, of us were motivated by the lure of extra credit, but I was genuinely interested in participating in the process on an Election Night — which, in those days, required us to spend most of the evening on the phone taking down vote totals from precincts by hand and passing along the totals to others, who would compile them. When all the precincts had been heard from, the numbers were passed on to the secretary of state's office in Little Rock.

After I graduated from college, I participated in similar work for newspapers on Election Nights to come. Whenever I did I always thought back to that night during my college days. Among other things I owe that to Roy.

He influenced so many of us — and he will never be forgotten.

My Friend the Hall of Famer

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Dr. Donna Lampkin Stephens, a friend and former colleague from my newspaper days in Arkansas, was inducted into the Arkansas Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame during the weekend.

It was the 10th induction class and the first to include a woman.

Donna's a trailblazer, all right, but I find myself thinking of her as a girl — not because I am sexist (I don't think I am) but because, darn it, Donna was a girl when I first knew her. I suppose I will always think of her that way.

We both graduated from the University of Arkansas with degrees in journalism and went to work for the Arkansas Gazette's sports department. I got there a few months before she did after I spent a year and a half at a smaller newspaper in central Arkansas. I think she came to the Gazette straight after her graduation from the University of Arkansas.

I worked on the copy desk. Donna wrote articles. I know she covered other sports because all of our writers had to cover sports other than their specialties, especially during football season, but she was primarily a golf writer. I edited her copy on many occasions. She was not only a good writer, she was a meticulous reporter.

I came to realize during my time as a sports copy editor that some sports are more difficult to make exciting in print than others. Golf seems especially stuffy in print. The fact that the TV announcers providing commentary for tournaments speak in a virtual whisper doesn't help — whereas a story about a home run or a touchdown and the accompanying roar — or deafening silence — of the crowd can almost write itself.

As the great Red Smith once observed, people go to or watch a sporting event to have fun, then they pick up the paper the next day to read about it and have fun all over again.

If the tournaments Donna covered were banal, it was hard to tell from her reports.

Donna isn't the first of my former colleagues to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. She isn't even the second — or third. We had a very talented staff at the Gazette. Sometimes I feel like the third baseman of the '27 New York Yankees. I mean, the '27 Yanks are remembered as one of the greatest baseball teams of all time, and everyone remembers the stars, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, from that team. But who remembers the third baseman? (It was Joe Dugan, by the way. He had a great reputation as a defensive player, but he hit fewer home runs in his career than Ruth did in the '27 season.)

I understood my role, though. As a copy editor, my job was defensive in nature. It was up to me to prevent mistakes from getting into print. If my work didn't attract attention, I figured I had been doing my job. A reporter's job, on the other hand, is to attract attention. If people don't read what a reporter has written, he/she is not getting the job done — even if the copy editor does a first–rate job of catching misspellings and keeping factual errors from making it into the morning paper.

Donna and I worked together for four years before I left to pursue my master's degree. Donna remained with the Gazette until it finally lost its war with the crosstown rival Arkansas Democrat. Since then she has earned her Ph.D. and become a successful journalism professor. She has also done a lot of freelance work for my hometown paper — a paper for which I wrote some freelance articles when I was in high school.

And she has written a book about the demise of the Gazette.

Very accomplished — and thoroughly deserving of this honor.

The Passing of a 'Giant' Among Journalists

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"Before politics was fed into computers and moveable maps came out, Jack Germond had it all in his head."

Walter Mears
Former Associated Press reporter

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Journalist Jack Germond, who died last week, was, in the words of colleague Jules Witcover, "a giant" of American journalism.

Many years ago, I read — for the first time — "Marathon," the book Witcover and Germond co–authored on the 1976 presidential campaign. I have read it several times since, each time with greater admiration.

The task was something of a marathon itself. The campaign was legendary at the time because the eventual winner, Jimmy Carter, had been running for a couple of years and, in that time, had risen from virtual obscurity to the presidency.

But you couldn't really tell the story of that campaign without going into a certain amount of detail on the Watergate scandal and the resignation of the man who won the previous presidential election, Richard Nixon.

So, whereas historian Theodore White had the luxury of writing about a single year — and, perhaps, a portion of another — in his groundbreaking accounts of presidential elections from 1960 to 1972, Witcover and Germond had to write about virtually the entire four–year period between the 1972 and 1976 elections.

They also had to write about something that was new in presidential politics at that time. Carter rose to prominence in large part because, unlike previous presidential hopefuls who chose to enter some primaries but not others, Carter ran everywhere. Germond and Witcover chronicled that development meticulously.

Nixon probably was the last president to take the traditional route to the White House. His campaigns in 1968 and 1972 were the transition from old–style presidential politics, in which nominations were decided by delegates who were handpicked by party elites, to modern presidential politics, in which the popular vote in primary elections tends to determine how a state's delegation will vote at the national convention.

And Witcover and Germond were there to report on it — for their contemporaries and the generations to follow.

"Jack was a truly dedicated reporter and had an old–fashioned relationship with politicians," Witcover told the Baltimore Sun. "He liked them, but that did not prevent him from being critical when they did bad things and behaved badly."

Journalists like Germond achieved a new influence on American politics during the transition of which Germond wrote. He was, in the words of NPR's David Folkenflik, "one of the reporters who helped to determine presidential winners and losers."

Howard Kurtz echoed Witcover's sentiment.

"Germond ... was a throwback in more ways than one," Kurtz wrote for Fox News, "a poker–playing, racetrack–dwelling, Falstaffian figure who would close down the bar at New Hampshire's Wayfarer Inn, then be up at 7 the next morning interviewing county chairmen."

Ah, yes, the horse racing thing. That is another passion I shared with Germond. I don't know how Germond came by it.

I've always enjoyed horse racing, but I discovered a true passion for it when I worked as a copy editor for the Arkansas Gazette's sports department.

I don't know if Germond ever did any better than I did at the track. I hope he did.

I do know that he achieved things in journalism I probably will never achieve. And I'm all right with that.

Because there aren't many Jack Germonds — maybe one or two — in a lifetime.

Goodbye, Steve

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I received a phone call today that, sadly, was like many others I have had in my life. I knew it was coming. But it's never a welcome phone call, even when it is expected.

A good friend of mine, Steve Davidson, died of cancer early today. I knew him when I lived in Little Rock in the 1980s. We haven't seen each other in quite awhile, but I have kept up with him through our mutual friend, Brady.

It was through Brady that I learned Steve was sick, and, in the words of Yogi Berra, it was like deja vu all over again. Another friend in our circle, Mike Culpepper, died of cancer more than 20 years ago, and I kept up with the changes in his condition through Brady. Steve, Brady and I were pallbearers at his funeral.

Brady and I spoke on the phone last night. He spent some time with Steve yesterday. Family and friends had been summoned to Steve's side in anticipation of the end, but Steve apparently surprised everyone. When Brady called me last night, I expected him to tell me that it was over. But, he said, Steve was still breathing when he left.

His breathing was increasingly labored, Brady told me, and he said he didn't expect Steve to live through the night. He didn't. Apparently, he died at 4 this morning.

The picture at the top of this post was taken when Steve and I arranged to meet in southern Arkansas in the fall of 1988. I had been living in Texas for a couple of months, and we got together one weekend. Steve was a deer hunter; I don't own a gun, but I brought my camera, as you can see.

See that little black lump behind Steve? That was my dog, Pepper, curled up into a ball and taking a nap. He was part black Lab and part something else. At that time, he was still a puppy, probably about 10 or 12 weeks old (I got him as a stray so I don't really know when he was born). He went everywhere with me in those days. He loved to run, to chase a rubber ball or do anything, really, and I recall that he thoroughly enjoyed that weekend in the woods. So did I — even though it was very cold.

Steve was Pepper's buddy, maybe moreso than any of my other friends (although Pepper really got along with everybody). I think it may have been because Steve was the first of my old friends to meet Pepper. As a matter of fact, they met on that trip to deer camp in October of 1988.

(I knew they would hit it off when I saw Steve giving table scraps to Pepper.)

When that picture was taken, we had been out hiking through the woods, and Steve had decided to sit down and take a breather. Pepper flopped down behind him and, as dogs do, caught a few Z's while we humans were resting and talking and laughing. When we got up to go, he was up and ready, too.

Somewhere, I have another picture of Steve with Pepper that was taken on that trip to deer camp. Steve was sitting in a folding chair at our campsite. Pepper was sitting next to him, and Steve was stroking his head. I'm not sure where that picture is, but, if I find it, I think I might have it framed. It's one of my favorites, and I need to have it on display.

Hard to believe that weekend was nearly 25 years ago. It's even harder to believe that I will never see Steve again.

Remember that circle of friends I mentioned earlier in this post? When I was living in Little Rock, we formed a computer football league, using a football game disk I had found for my old Commodore 64. The league survived for three years after I left Arkansas. Every time I came back for a visit, I packed up my computer, and my visits became football weekends.

Eventually, the league fell by the wayside. But our friendships never did. The league began to falter after Mike died, but it survived for another year or so. But that's another story.

When I left Arkansas, it was to enroll in graduate school. About a week after I moved, Mike and Steve came down for a visit. The three of us went to Six Flags Over Texas, and I'll never forget sitting on a bench with Steve and watching as Mike rode a roller coaster over and over again. It became a running joke with the three of us, one that Steve and I never mentioned again after Mike died.

Now, I'm the only living person who remembers that afternoon.

I was between my first and second semesters of grad school when Steve and Mike paid me another visit — around New Year's. As it happened, Arkansas was playing in the Cotton Bowl, and we decided, at the very last minute, that we wanted to go to the game. I tried to pull every string I could, never thinking that I could actually get something at the last minute — but, lo and behold, I was able to get three tickets, and we went to the game.

The Razorbacks didn't play too well that day, but the three of us had a fine time, anyway. I still have the game program I bought that day, and, from time to time, I thumb through it, and my thoughts return to that sun–splashed afternoon. For many years, it has been mostly a reminder to me of Mike. Now, it will remind me of Steve as well — and of the afternoon the three of us shared.

Again, I am now the only living person who recalls that experience.

Sports so often figured prominently in our friendship — and I am not speaking only of computer football or the Cotton Bowl.

When I first knew Steve, I was working on the sports desk of what was then the most widely circulated newspaper in Arkansas — the Arkansas Gazette. That job came with certain perks that appealed to Steve. For one, I had access to early editions of the newspaper, which came in handy on Saturday nights when the first edition of the Sunday paper complete with the coupons hit the newsroom.

On those occasions, I often brought several copies of the coupon inserts to Steve and my other friends.

As a member of the Gazette's sports team, I used to get a season pass to watch the minor league baseball team in Little Rock, the Arkansas Travelers. This wasn't as valuable as it sounds — admission to Traveler games in those days was only about two bucks a head — but I used it frequently on my nights off.

Since admission was free for me, I would pay for half of Steve's ticket, and it was like each of us got in for a single dollar. Besides, as a Gazette copy editor, I could go up to the press box and visit whoever was covering the game for the newspaper that night, and Steve went with me.

Steve enjoyed rubbing elbows with people whose bylines he had been seeing for years. And he got a kick out of the bird's–eye view of the action on the field.

Same thing applied to horse racing.

I didn't get a free season pass to the races at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, but whenever Steve and I went there together, I did get us in to the press box where we could see the writer who was covering the horses for the Gazette — and, on one memorable occasion, I introduced Steve to Terry Wallace, the fellow who called the races at Oaklawn.

I don't think I ever saw Steve so starstruck. He'd been hearing that man's voice call every race he had ever seen at Oaklawn — and there he was, shaking hands with him, chatting with him.

"I'll never forget that," he told me when we left the press box that day. I hope that was a pleasant memory for Steve over the years.

There is even a sports connection to the timing of Steve's death. Nineteen years ago today, the Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team defeated Tulsa in the regional semifinals. They ultimately won it all.

I kind of think that might have appealed to Steve.

Perhaps my greatest regret after Mike died was the fact that I never said goodbye to him. I should have. I had a couple of opportunities, and I let them slip through my fingers. Maybe I was scared. I don't know.

I'm older now, and I truly believe that if I had been in Little Rock this weekend, I would have been able to tell Steve that he had been a true friend and that I will miss him.

I think he knew. I hope he did.

Remembering the Old Gray Lady

Next Tuesday — October 18 — probably won't have much significance for most people.

Oh, I guess they'll have a party of some sort in Sarah Palin's home. It's Bristol's 21st birthday, and Sarah will have no excuse not to be there since she isn't running for president.

Like any other day on the calendar, October 18 has had some noteworthy events, although most have been, to borrow Lincoln's phrasing, little noted nor long remembered.

But tomorrow, a group of my friends and former colleagues will gather in Little Rock in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the final edition of the Arkansas Gazette.

For them — and for those of us who cannot be there in person but will be there in spirit — it is like remembering a departed loved one.

I am sure it will be a bittersweet occasion. Some of the folks who gather may not have seen each other since the Gazette went out of business, and others literally spent their lives in dedication to standards of excellence that had been long established.

For many who attended the University of Arkansas and majored in journalism — and studied reporting under the tutelage of Roy Reed, whose journalism career included tours of duty at the Gazette and the New York Times — we were prepared for eventual careers at the Gazette much like ball clubs groom ballplayers in the minors.

It never surprised me when one of us gravitated to the Gazette. Most of the time, it was more a question of when, not if.

I spent more than 4½ years of my life working on the Gazette's sports copy desk, but my memories of the Gazette go back even farther — to my childhood. I grew up reading the Gazette. It chronicled the events that shaped the world in which I lived.

I still have copies of the Gazette reporting that men walked on the moon and Richard Nixon decided to resign. My mother saved them for me in plastic bags to preserve them, but her strategy has had mixed results. The bags have failed to keep those papers from aging, but they have managed to slow the aging process.

I will always remember when I was offered a job at the Gazette.

It was a chilly, mid–December day. I had come in to take my editing test a few days earlier, and I was overwhelmed with awe at merely being inside the building where so many writers whose work I admired came and went every day. Working at the Gazette had been my dream, and — lo and behold — I found myself in its newsroom.

To say that I felt very small at that moment would be an understatement, but I pressed on and completed the test — although it was often tempting to look up and gawk at the reporters whose names I knew so well milling about. A few days later, after my test had been evaluated, I was asked to return. I was ushered into the office of one of the editors, who told me my editing had been unremarkable "but your headlines were exceptional."

He had to leave the office for a few minutes — I never found out why — and I glanced at the copy of the Gazette on the corner of the desk while I waited. Before long, I will be part of this newspaper, I remember thinking to myself. Nothing had been offered yet so I guess that was wishful thinking on my part — but it did come to pass a few minutes later.

When it did, I can honestly say I have never felt such jubilation in my life.

I raced to my car and drove home, eager to call my parents in Dallas and share the news. My mother was especially excited, having been an admirer of the Gazette at least since it publicly supported the integration of Little Rock's Central High School (and won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service), and my memory of that conversation is that she finished my sentences for me.

"I was called in for a meeting with Mister ..." I began.

"Patterson!" she finished for me and literally squealed with delight. My mother actually squealed! On the other end of the line, I was grinning from ear to ear.

The time I spent on the Gazette staff was not nearly as important as when men walked on the moon or Nixon resigned, I guess, although those years did include some noteworthy things to which most people probably won't devote much, if any, thought until such time as they stumble on to the accounts they find in dusty archives or on microfilm (if it even exists anymore).

But they were important at the time.

And that was what drove us.

We who worked for the Gazette — in my day and, I suspect, well into the 19th century — gave little, if any, thought to how our words would be perceived in years to come by future generations. Our motives were more blue collar than that, I suppose. We sought to keep our readers informed of what was happening in their world at that time. The future would have to take care of itself.

The Gazette had a proud history, and I was proud to be a part of it. Until 1991, it was known as the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi.

It began its existence in a place called Arkansas Post, Arkansas' territorial capitol in the southeastern quadrant of the state, in 1819. A fellow named William Woodruff printed the first edition.

Woodruff, who was originally from New York, was always a pioneering sort, and, when the capitol moved to recently surveyed Little Rock a couple of years later, the Gazette moved, too. When Arkansas became a state in 1836, the Gazette was the first to report the news.

For more than half of the 20th century, the Gazette was published by a man named J.N. Heiskell. I don't know if it was because of Heiskell's influence or Woodruff's, but the Gazette sought to be the Southern version of the New York Times. It wanted to be the newspaper of record — and it adopted many of the Times' quirky style rules and peculiar spellings in its style supplement.

The Times actually was younger than the Gazette, having been founded in 1851, and had been nicknamed "the Gray Lady." Because the Gazette was older and openly tried to emulate the Times, it became known as "the Old Gray Lady."

And, in 1908, the Gazette moved to the historic building that was its home for the rest of its existence — and then served as the headquarters for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.

Just seeing pictures of that building today take me back over the years to the time when it was a huge part of my life. The memories are as thick as flies, as James Earl Jones said in "Field of Dreams," so thick you almost have to brush them away from your face with your hands.

I wasn't there at the end, when hundreds of Gazette employees lost their jobs, but I was there near the end, when the Gazette was struggling in vain to turn back its rival in a vicious newspaper war, trying to do everything it could — even though most of us, I think, realized that the Gazette had missed its opportunity several years before.

By the time the powers that be at the Gazette recognized the Arkansas Democrat for the threat it had become, it was too late. Not even the sale of the paper to the Gannett Co., with its "deep pockets" (the phrase that was always trotted out to appease Gazette staffers who were worried about the paper's future), could postpone the inevitable.

Gannett couldn't forestall the Democrat. It did drive many of us away, though — to other papers, other states, other cities, other endeavors.

I enrolled in graduate school, got my master's degree and wound up teaching editing on the college level for a time — even though I was told that my editing was unremarkable when I was hired to do precisely that at the Gazette (it is worth noting that I was in my 20s at the time).

I'm back in the classroom again, teaching news writing as an adjunct professor at the local community college — and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't refer to something I heard that was said or a decision I witnessed that was made at the Gazette.

Some of the people I worked with in those days are no longer living, but I'm sure that those who are still around, whether they are in Little Rock tomorrow or not, would say that their time at the Gazette has had a lasting influence on their lives, too.

It was special. It may be the most important work I will ever do in my life. I'm proud of that, and I'm proud of the people with whom I worked.

I wish I could be with them tomorrow.

What About Bob?

When I was growing up in Arkansas, the Arkansas Gazette — which was, at the time, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi — would run editorials endorsing candidates in various races during the campaign and then would publish a list recapping those endorsements in the days just before the primary or election.

I knew people who would cut out that list and take it with them to the polls so they would know who not to vote for.

Now, I grew up appreciating the writing in the Gazette — and I was proud to work for the Gazette for nearly five years — but I would be the first to tell you that the Gazette's editorial board and its readers seldom saw eye to eye on the candidates and issues of the day.

Even when the candidates who were endorsed by the Gazette actually won, it often seemed that, when the voters went along with the Gazette's choices, they did so grudgingly — as if they really had no alternatives. That wasn't true, of course. There were almost always other choices, but sometimes they were so objectionable that even voters who habitually voted against the Gazette's selections really could not rationalize voting for them, even out of spite.

The Gazette went out of business nearly 20 years ago, and sometimes I wonder what some of those Arkansans do for political guidance now.

I can't provide them with a website or the name of a local publication that can fill that particular void.

However, if they are looking for a crystal ball in reverse, I'd like to point them in the direction of Bob Shrum, a Democratic political adviser.

In The Week, Shrum writes of his concern about "the emergence of a consensus that Barack Obama could lose next year."

Until recently, Shrum writes, his perception was that there was sense of "a gradually strengthening if not yet popularly perceived recovery" combined with "a weak Republican field most notable for those who opted not to run," all of which indicated that Barack Obama was on course to win a second term next year.

But some clouds have appeared on his sunny horizon — in the form of the latest unemployment report, an article in the New York Times that points out that no president since FDR has been re–elected when unemployment was 7.2% or higher and a Washington Post/ABC News poll that shows disapproval growing over Obama's handling of the economy.

But not to worry, Shrum assures his readers, even though he acknowledges that the "bump" in popularity that Obama enjoyed after the killing of Osama bin Laden disappeared almost as quickly as it came.

"[M]uch of the new mood is too instant, too superficial, and too casually ahistorical," Shrum writes.

And I will admit that he makes a good point when he says that perception is really what matters when voters go to the polls — not necessarily those troublesome facts.

When Ronald Reagan — who was re–elected with a 7.2% unemployment rate in 1984 — won his second term, Shrum observes, "joblessness was almost exactly the same — only one tenth of a point lower — on Ronald Reagan's 'morning in America' [as] it had been on his inaugural morning four years earlier."

In the interim, "the rate spiked to 10.8 percent; what Americans believed and felt when they re–elected him was that the subsequent decline proved the economy was on a steady upward trajectory," writes Shrum. "That's what counts, not any absolute benchmark for jobs or growth."

We'll see if Shrum is right. After all, this is the guy who assured Democrats last fall that they would retain control of the House.

And history tells you how accurate that prediction turned out to be.

Of Men and Missions ... and Money

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I will admit that I haven't always been sure how I felt about Al Neuharth.

For the most part, I think he is a businessman, although he fancies himself a journalist. He founded USA Today, the crown jewel of the Gannett empire — and, as a one–time copy editor for the Arkansas Gazette, I have my share of issues with the way Gannett ran the Gazette in the last years of its existence — which I have always regarded as short–sighted, at best.

Neuharth wasn't with Gannett when it decided to close the Gazette, but he had been part of its culture, part of its mindset. So I am conflicted. Often, when I read what Neuharth has written, his opinions seem reasonable to me. But I never seem to know where the often–idealistic (and, admittedly, sometimes naive) journalist ends and the hard–nosed businessman takes over.

Anyway, I've been reading his "Plain Talk" column at USATODAY.com in which he takes issue with Barack Obama's message to NASA last week.

Yesterday, I wrote about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13 and the need to stand by NASA. I said that I hoped Obama was telling the truth when he pledged the nation's unwavering support for the space agency.

Today, I read that Neuharth says Obama "in effect pulled the plug on our space program."

John F. Kennedy "must have turned over in his grave," Neuharth wrote.

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I have disagreed with Obama on many occasions. But, as far as I know, we've always spoken the same language. When we have disagreed, it was on the substance and/or the logic of the ideas, not the definition of words.

I know that words can mean different things to different people — certainly to different generations. But I think there's only one way to interpret the phrase "pull the plug" on something.

And I clearly heard Obama say, "I am 100% committed to the mission of NASA and its future." There's only one way to interpret that as well. Right?

So it appears that what we have here, as they said in "Cool Hand Luke," is a failure to communicate.

Well, not really, if you know much about Neuharth's history. Perhaps a failure to comprehend.

See, Neuharth's been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq. He has compared U.S. involvement in Iraq to its involvement in Vietnam. And it is through that lens that he tends to view and evaluate all other federal spending decisions.

In the interest of full disclosure, I, too, have been opposed to the war in Iraq since the beginning. And I think the spending level to which the government has been committed in Iraq played a role in the recession that has had this country in a stranglehold for nearly 2½ years. But it's only one of the issues that needs to be addressed.

And Obama does appear to be winding down — in a responsible way — American military involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen less effort being made to create jobs, but Neuharth touches on one such NASA–related effort (in his view) in his critique.

"Unfortunately, some political and business leaders in Florida are buying the Obama plan because it may provide a few jobs for some of those thousands who will be unemployed here when the shuttle program ends," he writes. "That should not be the most important of our nation's concern."

Well, it seems to me that the phasing out of the space shuttle program has been in the works for awhile. I believe the program's retirement originally was called for by George W. Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration. There has been some legislative maneuvering that may have contributed to a temporary impression that the program could be revived, but the plan to mothball the shuttle could hardly be considered an Obama initiative.

And, in this economy, anything that may provide some jobs for displaced specialists is not something to be dismissed lightly.

After doing a little light name–dropping (in this case, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, who calls Obama's plan for NASA "devastating"), Neuharth says this: "Obama's proposal is all about money priorities and our inexcusable war costs, not about peaceful world leadership. His proposed budget for 2011 makes that clear:

• Wars: $159.3 billion.


• Space: $19 billion.

"That suggests Obama thinks that wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq are nearly 10 times more important than exploring the last frontier in space."

Maybe I missed something, but I don't get that message.

News From Home

I grew up in Conway, Ark. It was a small town when I was a child, outwardly not much different from many towns in Arkansas in those days.

Today, it is at least five times, maybe six times, as large as it was then, and it is noteworthy for having been the home, even if for a short time, of some prominent people. Actress Mary Steenburgen, for example, went to college there. So did Scottie Pippen, who went on to play pro basketball with Michael Jordan. Football player Peyton Hillis was born and raised there, then attended my alma mater, the University of Arkansas. Last May, I wrote about Conway when Kris Allen was a finalist on American Idol.

But before any of those people came along, Conway was known — at least in Arkansas — as the home of Justice Jim Johnson.

Earlier today, an old friend of mine sent me an e–mail. Justice Jim died yesterday at the age of 85. Authorities are saying that he killed himself. Reportedly, he had had some health issues, and a rifle was found near his body.

When he was a young man, Justice Jim was an Arkansas Supreme Court justice. That's where the "Justice" part of his name came from. He had twin sons, Danny and David, who were my age and my almost–constant playmates. They lived just down the road from us so, when we were kids, it seemed the three of us were always at the Johnsons' house or mine.

Justice Jim was part of the state Supreme Court until 1966, when Orval Faubus chose not to seek another term as governor. Justice Jim sought and won the Democratic nomination for governor, and apparently, he did so using the segregationist rhetoric that was all too common among Southern Democrats at that time (I say "apparently" because I was too young to sit through or comprehend a politician's speech so I never, to my knowledge, heard anything he said during that campaign).

That fall, I enrolled in first grade. Justice Jim's sons were in my class, and the camera crews from the TV stations in Little Rock were on hand to film the event. The reporters were interested in seeing Justice Jim's sons in school with blacks.

I don't recall if Justice Jim was there or if his wife handled the matter of enrolling their sons. I just remember the disruptive influence those reporters and cameras had. The kids, as I remember, got along fine. Eventually, my first grade teacher had to shoo the adults away so she could get down to business with her pupils.

Later that year, Justice Jim lost the governor's race to Winthrop Rockefeller, the first Republican elected governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction.

In those days, Arkansas elected its governor to two–year terms so, two years later, Rockefeller ran for re–election. Once again, there was a Johnson in the race. Only this time, it was Justice Jim's wife, Virginia. She was unsuccessful in her race for the nomination, but she was a pioneer — the first woman to run for governor in Arkansas' history.

At the same time, Justice Jim challenged Sen. J.W. Fulbright, who was seeking re–election. Fulbright was nominated, then re–elected, and the Johnsons returned to their home in Conway. I can still remember walking through their home in those days and seeing leftover yard signs from their respective campaigns.

Justice Jim was an ally of George Wallace. I remember sitting at his kitchen table the day Wallace was shot and a reporter from the Arkansas Gazette called to get a quote. Justice Jim gave him one. It was a "dastardly act," he said. After he hung up the phone, he looked at his sons and me, grinned and said, "That sounded like a bad word, didn't it?"

Justice Jim and I seldom discussed politics. He knew that my parents didn't agree with most of what he said, and that was OK. He was protective of me like a son. He didn't say things to me that he knew would create a conflict in my young head. He only said things to me that he knew would be all right with my parents. He told me to do right. He told me to be respectful and to be fair. He was always courteous, the very image of a Southern gentleman, to my parents and me, indeed, to everyone with whom he came in contact.

And I have tried to follow his instructions and his example.

I've heard that Bill Clinton once told Justice Jim, "You make me ashamed to be from Arkansas." I never felt that way. I have always been proud to be from Arkansas, and Justice Jim was a big part of that. Not because of his politics, but because of the man he was.

I can't help but think of the ironies, though. Justice Jim, opponent of desegregation, dies during the first presidential term that was won by a black man.

If I had ever speculated about when it would all end for Justice Jim, I never would have expected that.

I certainly never would have predicted that he would die by his own hand.

But I don't judge him for the choices he made — or that were made for him.

A couple of years ago, I was talking to one of his sons on the phone. He was telling me that his father had changed, that he had been a product of the times in which he was born and raised and that he regretted some of the things he had said in the heat of his political battles. I tried to reassure my friend that I didn't hold any of his father's political statements against him, no matter how much I may have disagreed with him.

And I don't judge him for choosing the option he chose. I've never had the gift of being able to look into a man's head and heart and know the pressure he felt or the demons he fought.

I pray for his sons — Mark, David and Dan — that they will have the strength to endure this ordeal, coming only a few years after Virginia's death. I'm sure they will.

And I also pray that Justice Jim has found the peace that eluded him in life.

Breaking News

The dire situation facing newspapers in America these days is every bit as severe as the unemployment problem.

In many ways, it is worse, I think, because a free press is so important in a democracy. Without it, I see no way for a free nation to remain free because there is no one to fill the watchdog role that literally keeps an eye on what elected officials do — or do not do.

Newspapers have been tumbling like dominoes in the last year or two, and, regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum, that should be a cause of concern for all of us.

A friend of mine sent me an e–mail this week. He observed that the New York Times Co. has decided not to sell the Boston Globe because its financial prospects had "significantly improved."

My friend concluded that this was a sign that the economy is getting better. From a business perspective, I suppose that isn't an unreasonable conclusion.

Unfortunately, his e–mail arrived in my inbox the same day that reports were circulating that the New York Times plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs by the end of the year.

So what is one to make of this?

I've heard many theories about the decline of newspapers. As someone who studied journalism in college and worked for newspapers for many years, I suppose I am naturally drawn to this subject. I have written about it in the past, in part to help me understand what is happening, and I see a certain amount of logic in each point that is raised.

I've heard it said, for example, that newspapers are struggling because the quality of writing has fallen. In turn, that has led to a drop in paid circulation.

There's no doubt in my mind that there is a relationship between writing that is weaker (or perceived to be weaker) than it used to be and decreased demand for the product.

But the thing that newspaper people understand that people outside the industry do not is that a drop in paid circulation is like a symptom of a disease. The disease that is killing daily newspapers is the decline in advertising revenue.

It never has been possible to pay all the expenses involved in running a daily newspaper with the revenue of a product that sells for 25¢ or 50¢ a copy. Even if a newspaper could sell its product at the Sunday rate seven days a week, it wouldn't be possible.

But the income from advertising is a different story. When advertising dollars begin to dry up, that's when the writing is on the wall for a newspaper, no matter how good (or bad) its writing is.

I was reminded of this today when I read the latest installment at a blog called The Arkansas Newspaper War. It is devoted to a topic with which I am familiar — the newspaper war between the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat that raged when I worked for the Gazette in the 1980s.

Today, the blog gives grades to the different departments at the Gazette, and the one in which I worked — news — gets an A+. If any of my former Gazette colleagues read this blog — and I know that at least one does — I'm sure that is a source of pride for them, as it is for me.

But then the author of the blog makes an important observation: "The Gazette ... was both weak and strong. Unfortunately, her weakness was in an area vital to success. If the well of ad dollars dries up, a daily newspaper cannot survive."

As the crisis in the newspaper industry has worsened, I've seen and heard a lot of talk about the rise of citizen journalists and internet news coverage taking their toll on daily newspapers. But, like declining paid circulation, they are only symptoms of a much larger problem for daily newspapers.

The real problem is the loss of advertising revenue. Unless newspapers can find someone with really deep pockets to pick up the slack — and it is worth noting that, in its final years, the Gazette's ownership, the Gannett Co., had pretty deep pockets — they cannot continue to exist.

And that is the kind of news that breaks a journalist's heart.

Rocky Mountain Postmortem

Bob Kravitz, a sports columnist for the Indianapolis Star, wrote a column that touched a few nerves yesterday.

For 10 years, Kravitz worked for the Rocky Mountain News, which went out of business last week. He came to Indianapolis in 2000. "I lost a dear old friend this week," the headline on his column said. And I could relate to many of his points.

I don't know how old Kravitz is or whether he majored in journalism in college. But I gather that we're about the same age and, yes, he probably did study journalism, just as I did.

Kravitz spent 10 years in Denver, working for a paper that was in the midst of an old-fashioned newspaper war. I've had some experience with that. In the 1980s, I worked on the sports copy desk at the Arkansas Gazette, which, at the time, was the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River.

I grew up reading the Gazette. It chronicled all the major news stories of my childhood years — the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the space race and the first landing on the moon, Watergate, Vietnam. In college, I read about the Camp David Accords and the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the pages of the Gazette. And, from the time I learned to read, I followed the Arkansas Razorbacks in the writings of Orville Henry, the longtime sports editor of the Gazette.

For a long time, the Gazette was virtually the only newspaper serving the state — until I was in college, when Little Rock's other (and, at the time, significantly smaller, in terms of circulation) newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat, made a commitment to challenging the Gazette for supremacy in the Little Rock and statewide markets.

The Gazette challenged some of the Democrat's business practices in federal court but ultimately lost that fight — and, eventually, the war itself, even though the paper was sold to the Gannett Co. in 1986. But Gannett, in spite of its financial resources, was unable to keep the Gazette competitive — not unlike the Rocky Mountain News, which also was owned by a large company, E.W. Scripps, for more than half of its 150-year existence.

I left Little Rock in 1988, after nearly five years of working for the Gazette so I wasn't there when the paper went out of business in 1991. But many of my friends and former colleagues were still there, and I felt the same sadness from a distance that Kravitz is feeling today.

"I am grief stricken today," Kravitz says. "My old newspaper is dead now, and I feel like a small part of me died with it."

A couple of months after the Gazette folded, the newspaper war here in Dallas came to an end. I wasn't living in the city at the time — I was living about 35 miles north of it — but I read the paper that became the casualty of that war, the Dallas Times-Herald. Although I was not personally employed by it, I mourned its demise because it meant that one more American city had no option, no balance in its local news coverage.

Little Rock was too small to support two newspapers. But even Dallas, one of the 10 largest cities in the nation, was too small, and the survivor of the newspaper war here, the Dallas Morning News, is having to resort to personnel cuts and other unpleasant business decisions to remain solvent.

So it should be no surprise that Denver, the 26th-largest city in America, was unable to support two daily newspapers. But that didn't keep many people from hoping that what happened this week would not come to pass.

Few cities remain where residents can choose which local newspaper they want to read. And, before long, many cities in America may be no-newspaper towns. Denver, as Kravitz observes, may be one of those towns. The survivor of the newspaper war there, the Denver Post, "is in almost as much financial distress as the now-defunct Rocky," Kravitz points out.

"I find myself grieving for the people there, good and decent people, great newspaper people who fought one of the country's last, true newspaper wars with energy, passion and pride," Kravitz writes.

And he acknowledges a fact that I and my former colleagues in Little Rock ultimately had to accept as well. "[O]ur performance never really made the difference in who survived and who didn't. The corporate suits and bean counters made that call."

Kravitz confesses to not knowing what to tell young people who are interested in journalism. I still believe what I have always believed, that it is a noble calling. But its existence is threatened.

"When a newspaper goes silent, a voice is lost," Kravitz writes. "In our democracy, in this marketplace of ideas, the more voices we have, the better."

Many people have a blind faith in the reliability of the internet and cable TV as news providers, based (I suppose) on the assumption that any technological change is an improvement. That is not necessarily the case. Is speed the same thing as quality or accuracy?

But, like many things these days, that, I fear, is a lesson we may have to pay a terrible price to learn — a price that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

'Our Town' Loses a Prominent Citizen

If you grew up in Arkansas, as I did, the name Richard Allin will always be special.

A columnist at the Arkansas Gazette for many, many years, Allin passed away of heart failure Thursday. He was the author of the "Our Town" column, first at the Gazette and then at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in the years after the Democrat acquired the rival Gazette in 1991.

When he retired in 2004, Allin was voted the most favorite columnist by Democrat-Gazette readers. He went to work at the Gazette in 1963 and took over the "Our Town" column two years later.

I knew Richard Allin. I wouldn't say we were close friends or anything like that, but we were acquaintances when I worked on the Gazette copy desk from 1984 to 1988. He was a gentleman and one of the most entertaining writers I've ever known.

According to the account from the Associated Press, Allin wrote, in his final column, that he "ate raccoon at Murry's, pig ears and snout in Paris, haggis in Inverness, Scotland, roadkill turtle in New Orleans and baked beans on toast in England — all in the name of duty. I have had more fun writing the Our Town column than any man is supposed to. I cherish every moment."

He was 77. But he was in his 50s when I knew him. And I've heard he was in poor health in his final days and weeks.

Rest in peace.