Newsbreak: Sold Out

Good morning...it’s 7 o’clock and this is an FM 89.3 newsbreak:

Americans head to the polls today to add their voices to one of the most interesting off-year elections in recent political history. All polls show the races tightly knotted. Across the country President Clinton hopes to grab voters by the ears with seven radio interviews. The radio blitz follows an eight day campaign swing for Democrats.

In Los Angeles, O.J. Simpson’s friend Al Cowlings will not be charged in connection with the murder of Nicole Brown Simpsons or Ron Goldman. Prosecutors say they do not have enough evidence to charge Cowlings, who drove the Ford Bronco the day of the Simpson slow-speed chase. Selection of the 15 alternate jurors starts today. Yesterday, Judge Lance Ito decided to keep the court room camera that has brought court coverage to millions of Americans.

And in New York, a judge sentenced a teenager Monday to nine years to life in prison for luring a 9-year-old boy into the woods and crushing his skull with a rock. Eric Smith confessed in 1993 to leading the victim to an overgrown lot where he first chocked the child and then bashed his head with a 26-pound rock.

Partly cloudy this morning with highs in the lower 80s; partly cloudy tonight, too, humid and lows in the mid-60s. Currently, at 7:02, it’s 72 degrees.

---

In mid-September I entered the Communication Building one morning and noticed the first signage of the semester announcing the impending Community Seven Charitable Auction. The slogan “Bids for Kids” featured prominently on the fluorescent-coloured posters, which was the popular and long-running catchphrase for the long-running program.

Being new to the department, I asked what this auction-thing was. I surprisingly received an earful.

The Community Charitable Auction began back in the mid-1970s – or so I was led to believe (it never failed to amaze me in later years that no one seemed to know any history about the Communication Department). While the method to the madness had evolved over the years, the concept was fairly simple: to raise money for the Morra County United Service League. To do this, every summer the Communication Department stretched its long tentacles out to local and regional businesses soliciting donations. For example, the local bakery might pitch in coupons for free cupcakes, City Coliseum might donate two season passes to their spring concert series, or local restaurants gave away gift certificates (I recall Señor Taco donated pints of their green sauce one year).

Anyway, here’s where the students came into play: we hosted the auction. (Well, they did – I never participated directly.) Sort of like the try-outs for news anchors, there were try-outs for emcees. Tradition stipulated that two males and two females be selected as “hosts” who would tag-team emcee duties throughout the four-hour program airing in mid-October. Those that did not make the cut received jobs answering phones, working behind the scenes, or “presenting” – which was little more than a cop-out to give students the face-time they thought they were owned.

There were about fifty people answering phones, including students and faculty from the Communication Department as well as other university and community leaders and officials (i.e. the provost and mayor). Viewers would watch until something they wanted came up for bid and then it was a mad dash to the phone. At the end of the given time, the item went to the highest bidder and the money went to the city’s United Service League office. Supposedly the department’s annual event was always one of the top five contributors to the United Service League (no one knew the history of that, either, though it was always touted as truth).

At least, that’s how I understood it went down. I wasn’t involved my freshman year, partly because there was little push in Dr. Propel’s class for us to participate in the behind-the-scenes work and partly because I had little desire to sit and answer phones for four hours (which, as a freshman, would have likely been my contribution). Nor did I get involved the next two years; it wasn’t until I was a senior and enrolled in the Special Events Programming class that I had to participate in the first-ever live television remote during the annual auction.

Like every other try-out for something on Channel 7, there were the usual two cliques: those that always auditioned and were awarded the role in question; and those that always sat in the nose-bleed seats and critiqued every move of those that got the role. I suppose like everything else there were those that were playing favorites and giving the visible role of emcee to friends.

Another friend, another evening spent listening to the auctioneer.

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Sold Out
(unknown)
Pocket Change with David Patt
From the album Intimate Notions
1991

Newsbreak: Writing on the wall

Good morning...it’s 7 o’clock and this is an FM 89.3 newsbreak:

President Clinton no longer wants his wife to lead the fight for health care reform. White House officials said Wednesday that two lesser known aides, Carol Rasco and Robert Rubin, will head the administration’s second attempt for health care reform. Officials also said Hillary Clinton recommended the change, feeling that the health care debate has moved to another stage.

Whatever happened to make American Eagle flight 4184 fall from the sky apparently happened too fast for the pilots to call for help. “There was no distress signal sent from the plane and no indication from conversation between the tower and aircraft,” Jim Hall, the chairman for the National Transportation Safety board, said Wednesday. However an NBC News report said that the cockpit voice recorder indicates that alarm after alarm suddenly went off signaling an emergency on Monday’s flight.

Back in Washington, a Colorado man was ordered to stand trial on charges he fired 27 bullets from a semi-automatic rifle at the White House last weekend. Francisco Martin Duran is charged with possessing a firearm as a convicted felon, destroying government property, assaulting a uniformed Secret Service agent and using a firearm while convicting a crime. If convicted on all counts he could face a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison.

Cloudy today with a high of 85; lows in the 70s, cloudy and humid tonight. Currently it’s 76 degrees.

---

I got a lot of strange looks from people when I said I had signed up for 8:00 a.m. classes my freshman year. No one in their right mind wants to get up early for class, I was told. My response usually echoed around the concept that it didn’t bother me, but also because one of the key classes I had to take (Introduction to Broadcasting) was offered at either 8-9:30 a.m. or 9:30-11 a.m. on T-days (Tuesdays and Thursdays). I suppose I wanted to get classes over with as soon as possible so the rest of the day could be mine.

This “get it done and over with” mentality also was why I stacked my M-days (Monday-Wednesday-Friday) with classes all morning. After four hours of classes I gave myself an hour for lunch – eaten with, of course, members of the Octumvirate – before heading off to final M-day class, English Composition I. There were little hesitations about this class as I had always done exceptionally well in high school literature and composition courses. I assumed this would be somewhat similar.

It turned out to be one of my least-liked classes that year for a number of reasons. First, the official text for the course was the Grandville English Primer, a hefty 1000+page text book compiled by the university English department in an assumed effort to come up with a book that did most of the work for them. The book had a little bit of everything in it, including long-winded chapters about sentence structure and grammar; how to cite sources, which seemed an almost verbatim copy of the Modern Language Association (MLA) handbook we also had to purchase; and finally some representative poetry and prose selections that would be discussed (or were going to be discussed) in the introduction English courses. My semester was the debut semester of the book, which featured an illustration that tired to look like a woodcut of the iconic 150-year-old Grandville Building on campus but failed and instead looked like a cheaply-created illustration.

Another thing to dislike about the course was the instructor, one Ms. Mona-Itza Getnam, best described as an annoying busy-body that was guided more by departmental rules and procedures than common sense. Some instructors had Ph.D.s and taught the upper-level courses and mucked about in bureaucratic issues, while others were graduate teaching assistants and worked in the writing lab and taught introduction classes during their studies to earn a master’s degree. Ms. Getnam fit into a second and thusly less fashionable group that had attained a master’s degree but was still regulated to instructing either introductory courses or English courses taken mostly by non-English majors.

Ms. Getnam’s syllabus for the class was the same one used by all the other Composition I instructors (something discovered and discussed with Lenny and Alan during mealtime). However I found out as the semester wore on that only Ms. Getnam paid strict attention to its details. The course outline was indeed very specific about what all classes should be doing each week of the semester; its major flaw, and that of the faculty panel that authored the text, was forgetting each class of students would act differently when presented with the lessons. Some classes would instantly understand the topic at hand, while other groups of students might need reinforcement about the concepts.

And the main “concepts” and “lessons” that Ms. Getnam and other similar instructors taught that semester were basic punctuation and capitalization skills. These were the same basic skills that my high school senior year English teacher had decided to focus on the year before, sensing that as seniors we could use a refresher to “wind down” our high school experience. Therefore I was subject to another year of a topic I felt everyone should have learned back in elementary school. There was refresher – which should have been one class sessions – and then there was overkill, which lasted two weeks too many.

Apparently Lenny and Alan were in English classes with students that far excelled the instructor’s expectations because they spent very little time on those subjects and moved into the writings found in the back of the primer. Even though a majority of the class mastered the subject and passed the countless end-of-day quizzes spring on us, we still had to spend time going over capitalization and punctuation because the syllabus said we had to.

There’s a note on the syllabus about the clock. Oh, yes..the clock on the back wall. Ms. Getnam got a huge kick in class the day she finally realized it was dead and that's why it was always ten minutes until three. Yes! How funny! Right in the middle of her reading an essay! But there was precious little else to remember about this class except those darn primers we had to spend upwards of $60 on at the start of the semester. When it came time to sell books back at the end of the year, the English Department, going through the motions of another brilliant idea, had decided to not use the books again. Bookstores were on strict order not to reshelve the book.

Plenty of reruns in class...no reusing the book. And that’s how Composition I became one of the worst classes that semester.

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Writing on the Wall
(Pat Coil/Grant Geissman)
Grant Geissman
From the album Reruns
1992

Newsbreak: Sold Out

Good morning...it’s 7 o’clock and this is an FM 89.3 newsbreak:

Susan Smith was not present at the funeral of her two young sons this past Sunday. She remained behind bars and charged with the boys’ murder. Smith’s confession, which was obtained by CNN, reported that she too intended to go into the lake as well. “I wanted to end my life so bad and was in my car ready to go....” Smith said. About 300 people crowded into the church to attend the service.

One day after President Ronald Regan announced that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, the pastor at the former president’s church praised him for making his condition public. Alzheimer’s is a non-reversible neurological disease that destroys the brain’s memory cells.

At least some of the alternate jurors yet to be picked for the O.J. Simpson murder trial are likely to play a key role in the trial, officials say. In the trial, expected to run six months, jurors may fall ill or encounter emergencies that will force them to drop out. Judge Lance Ito has asked for 15 alternates which is an unusually large number. Today Ito is to rule on whether to allow cameras to televise the trial.

Sunny today with highs in the upper 70s; lows in the 50s tonight with fair skies. Currently, at 7:02, it’s 57 degrees.

---

My freshman year was apparently one for the books as far as the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice was concerned. Early in the semester, tenured CCJ professor Dr. Henbane was arrested for lewd behavior at a highway rest stop and soon after a handful of students were arrested for credit card fraud.

An article in the student-published Screed quoted a law enforcement official who said the investigation had begun back in 1990 and it was only now, four years later, before any arrests could be made. It was the arrests that surely made the CCJ people happy: of the twelve students arrested, four were sons or daughters of police officers and CCJ majors. The other eight people were business majors, a fact quickly overlooked, so it seemed, by those who found CCJ majors being arrested delightfully ironic and, rightfully so, embarrassing.

This, though, was the tip of the iceberg, as further reports indicated there were as many as 50 people involved in what police dubbed a “pick clique” rather than organized scam. I remember this term – “Pick Clique” – being something that garnered some laughs from my peers. Why couldn’t the police just call this a “crime ring” or “circuit” and be done with it, instead of coming up with some artsy-fartsy rhyming term?

Members of this “Pick Clique,” which the paper said represented both sexes and several races, stole credit cards, checks, and student identification cards from cars, purses, backpacks, lockers, dorm rooms, and so on. There was little difficulty finding members of the clique that looked like the students who had been robbed, which made using the stolen items a cinch. Officials said that the clique then found their friends with jobs who would accept the stolen checks or credit cards, and later “forget” who used them.

Overall the story seemed to hit more emotions than the story of Dr. Henbane did, if only because it was current and past CCJ students. The general consensus of the students interviewed in the Screed and the Examiner was that these four people should be embarrassed for representing not just the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice – where it was said students should be held to a greater and higher moral standard – but the university as well. There were some students under the auspices that all the students should be removed from the university though I don’t think that came about. Chances are those arrested weren’t going to be receiving passing marks in their classes that semester anyway. I doubt you could do distance education courses from the county lock-up.

Besides being mentioned in our radio newscasts, this story, too, made for easy banter during DJs shifts just as Dr. Henbane’s ordeal had. I must admit that the DJs my freshman year really made a point of keeping their eyes and ears open to university news. In later years DJs mumbled through music shifts with scant interest in talking about something other than music or themselves. There was a goldmine of topics to find in the Screed. We just needed to take the time to find them!

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Sold Out
(unknown)
Pocket Change with David Patt
From the album Intimate Notions
1991

Newsbreak: History 101

Good morning...it’s 7 o’clock and this is an FM 89.3 newsbreak:

The Colorado man who left a cryptic note about death will be arraigned today on property damage and firearm violations after his frightening shooting spree on the White House Saturday. The gun man, 26-year-old Francisco Martin Duran, remained silent at D.C.’s Central Cellblock, his motives still a mystery. The note he left spoke of affairs if he were to die, similar to a will than a suicide note. The note contained no threat against President Clinton.

Israel will being reopening Gaza Strip border crossings this week that were previously sealed after the deadly bombing of a Tel Aviv bus, the prime minister said Sunday. Yitzhak Rabin met with PLO leader Yasser Arafat on Sunday before the opening of a Middle East summit aimed at promoting economic development in the region.

Highs in the mid-80s with scattered thunderstorms later; tonight clear and cool with lows near 50. Currently it’s 63 degrees.

---

During that first semester my freshman year I always seemed to be on the move on Monday and Wednesday mornings. I was up and out of bed in Bowman Hall before 6:00, at the Communication Building an hour before my newscast as 7:00, at the Public Health Building at 8:00 for my first class of the day, and then I had to scoot over to the Business & Economics Building (or the “Bebe”) for a course on United States History at 9:00.

I remember thinking at the time that the schedule must be wrong – why was my history class in the business building? No, the schedule was correct (as usual). Eventually I was able to discern that the history department had no building of their own and was regulated to the basement of one of the academic classroom buildings, and the business building was used because it had a vacant auditorium at this hour of the day. The walk from the Health Building was short and I stumbled into the auditorium my first day surprised at the size of the class. It was easiest the largest class I had that semester.

Leading the hour-long discussion on American History (from its earliest perceived beginnings to 11:59 a.m. on Monday, May 25, 1863) was one of the most colorful and popular professors on campus, Henry Varvas. It was hard to say what made him so popular. He had taught on campus for twenty-some years, had published a couple hundred articles on various historic people and events, and despite his high intellect was known as a mildly easy grader. That is until he came across a student-penned essay on a test that smacked of stupidity; this set him off which resulted in stricter grading on the remainder of the exams.

One quirk of Dr. Varvas was his distinct way of walking – he had a somewhat comical bounce in every other step. Some may have laughed and thought this was all for show, but it wasn’t long before he explained the reason: he had lost a leg to cancer. He had made great strides in using his prosthetic leg (pun intended and, in fact, his words) but did not appreciate people recognizing him only because of his gait. He told the story of a woman approaching him while shopping and gushing that she had heard about how great an instructor he was from her husband who was a student “a while back.” Varvas looked at her calmly and asked how she knew he was in fact who she thought he was. The woman confessed it was because of the way he walked. This evidently pissed him off not just at the time of the story but when he told us the tale in class – he raised his voice and acted insulted with us in the audience. It seemed a bit much to get sore about but I don’t think anyone felt the urge to argue with him.

The one nice thing about Varvas’ class was that he made it no secret in that first session that he didn’t meet Friday; in layman’s terms that meant he didn’t hold class, have office hours, or as many believed even venture from his home to the campus. That, my friends, is called tenure. To make up for the required third hour each week Varvas had setup what he called “discussion sessions” supervised by his two teaching assistants (T.A.) (real names forgotten but let’s call them Rael and Brandine). These “discussions” were equated to “lab credit,” which meant the group of undergrads met once a week to take silly little quizzes about what we learned in class. Fortunately my “lab” was right after class on Wednesday and so I and a few others followed Rael and Brandine across campus to the makeshift history department headquarters. Neither T.A. seemed as intelligent as Varvas but they tried to explain some of the topics in a “not-as-hoity-toity” manner.

A year later, when I was a sophomore and involved more heavily in radio news, I spotted Dr. Varvas’ name on the list of experts the university had created. The directory served to connect the media or other interested parties with subject matter experts for commentary or analysis on varying subjects. Though his name was part of the directory, Dr. Varvas was not too keen on hearing his voice transmitted...that day or the other few times I tried to get his insight on something in the news.

I always found it odd that he couldn’t keep quiet in class yet he refused his voice on the radio.

Maybe he had microphone trepidations, too.

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History 101
(Mark Cardenas/Robert Charles/Charles Neville/Mark Smith)
Songcatchers
From the album Dreaming in Color
1994

Newsbreak: Television Dork

Good morning...it’s 7 o’clock and this is an FM 89.3 newsbreak:

The Muslim militant group Hamas said Monday it will launch a terrorist attack this week during President Clinton’s visit to the Middle East. The leaders of Hamas say the attack will be in revenge for Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reported orders to assassinate Hamas leaders on sight. Clinton arrives in the Middle East Wednesday for the signing of the Israel/Jordon Accord ending forty-six years of war between the two countries.

U.S. Special Forces teams are tracking two small bands of anti-government gunmen through southwestern Haiti but after weeks of searching only 64 weapons and one man were found. In a raid a couple weeks ago, Green Berets seized 33 weapons and took one man into custody. In another raid 31 weapons were found.

Highs in the mid-70s with early showers and scattered thunderstorms later; tonight more showers and cool with lows in the 50s. Currently it’s 69 degrees.

---

Must have been a slow news day. Anyway...

Shortly after the school year began in September – and not too long after the semester kick-off meeting for the radio staff – signs began to appear throughout the Communication Building reminding us students that we could try out to become an anchor for Community Channel 7. The cable-only television station was run by students and featured programs created by students, who in turn had hopes that more than just students watched. There was, however, little doubt that students, let alone anyone, watched the programs with any regularity.

The newscasts had, for years, aired under assorted titles all based on “Channel 7 News” (i.e. “Community News 7” or “Community Channel 7 News”) though this semester, and apparently for one or two years before my freshman year, the program had been dubbed “Cable 7 News” in a presumed effort to point out the obvious. Anchor try-outs were held early each long semester (non-Summer session) to pick two teams of four that would host the thirty minute program on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. The cast was the usual stock characters: a male and female news reader, a third person to read sports scores, and a fourth person to point at maps.

Interested parties were to show up a week or so later, dressed as how they would present themselves on the air. This meant neckties, Sunday-best dresses, perfectly coifed hair, and a lot of alcohol-based perfumes and colognes that didn’t work well together. One by one each student was given a script and seated behind the anchor desk (or semi-circular table, as it was in those days) to face the music, or camera, as it were. Try-outs were held in Studio 1, which was the largest therefore most important studio the School of Communication had. There was a little bit of everything in the studio, including the news desk, two interview sets, a blue chroma key wall, a black wall, and then piles of junk stashed in corners or propping up set walls.

Did I go through with try-outs? Not at all. I didn’t feel 100% at ease behind the microphone on the radio yet and didn’t feel the need to allow people to see what I looked like on television. I did however ask Troy Meadows, the radio News Director my freshman year, if I could watch from the studio. It turned out that Troy had been a reporter for Channel 7 the previous year and now, as a senior member of the staff, would be helping with the try-outs. Troy said I could come in for a few minutes to see a working studio but that visitors were mostly frowned upon. This wasn’t show-and-tell after all, it was the news.

Well, sort of. A few weeks later I watched one of the first Cable 7 News programs of the school year and wasn’t that impressed. I recognized a few people on the broadcast: Troy had a story relating to students coming back to campus and Mike, the guy I knew from Thursday morning radio, showed up with another in his series called “Open Mike” where he interviewed people around campus on various topics (apparently Mike was just as familiar with television as he was with radio). I suppose what made me disinterested though was the “attitude” of the program with its anchors promoting stories with false urgency and reading scripts with bland energy. None of us were a professional in any of our roles in that Communication Building – we were all there to learn and some of us had more to learn than others – but it was clear we all needed practice in our craft.

Sadly, the one aspect of Cable 7 News that did not require practice was the promotions staff that turned out some of the most pretentious stuff I’d ever seen. Less than a week after the anchor teams had been decided upon, the new ads began to appear on other Community Channel 7 programs. There were probably a half dozen or so different spots but all on the same theme: shots of the anchors and reporters working at their “desk,” receiving a phone call, and then heading out to campus or somewhere in town to “cover” the story. What made the ads showy? First off, the “desk” the “news team” used belonged to the instructors; these scenes were taped after hours to give the illusion that each student had a room-sized office to his-or-herself. Intercut with shots of students receiving phone calls were shots of students grabbing an aspect of clothing (i.e. suite coat) and running with a photographer down the “news room hall” (the same hall everyone used during the day; now virtually empty because it was taped at 9 p.m.) toward the door. This was followed by shots of the student arriving at the story and preparing to go “live” (really live-to-tape) with what they’ve learned.

At the end of the 30-second spots the scene faded to a shot of the news team talking with each other as they walked down a hall in the Communication Building. The students had that air of crisp seniority or mock forcefulness in their walk, as if they were seasoned authorities on whatever it was they were doing; you know, sort of like in the opening credits of Law and Order. But there were various shots used to make different promos: one scene was of the four-person Tuesday night broadcast team, one scene was of the four-person Thursday night broadcast team; there was one of the four news anchors from both nights, one of the two weather anchors, and one of the two sports anchors. All permutations ended with someone trying to sound like Bill Kurtis or Gary Owens announcing “Cable 7 News.”

Community Channel 7 was almost the polar opposite of the radio station in numerous characteristics. Where the radio station staff had set directors with a chain of command of both students and faculty, the television staff was a jumbled mess of students vying for command amongst each and with the department head. There were, as the saying goes, too many chiefs. There was also a flawed sense of importance that I noticed in my four years as a student: a lot of communication majors looked down in disgust at the radio station. Radio, it seemed, was the bane of the department. I never really understood this attitude. Even though our broadcasts were far more immediate – we were on five days a week with numerous newscasts compared to Channel 7’s one thirty minute program twice a week – television on the other hand was supposedly a more creative medium. It’s also the medium where people got to be seen and always figured a lot of people got into this field to boost their ego after being bashed down in high school.

Needless to say, I found radio far more rewarding but it didn’t take long my freshman year to realize that television would be in my future as a student.

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Television
(Dork)
Dork
From the album Other White Meat
1997