JFK

Today another story out there about who killed President Kennedy.  Fifty years ago.  Like maybe who or what did it is still alive and ready to confess.  Or that finally confirming this or that version changes anything.  It's my sense that all these whodunit pieces in print and TV are created by people who weren’t alive when JFK was shot to death in Dallas.  That they have no idea what mattered and what the story was.  

They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Virtually every person conscious that day, November 22, 1963, every one of us remembers where he or she was when they heard.  Exactly.  I was in an English class at college.  The class ended abruptly.  Silent except for the sound of people crying.

There are not many moments where most of the people on this planet share an experience.  Pearl Harbor for my parents’ generation was like that, I gather.  Surely 9-11 and the planes flying into the Towers.   It is the electric minute, all of us with our fingers in the same plug, horrible and thrilling. If you are young now, and you imagine telling your offspring one day about 9-11, do you think you will talk about the conspiracy or the terrorists or some guy reading a children’s book to a kindergarden class?  I’m guessing not, rather that you’ll tell your children where you were and what you felt when you heard.  I’m predicting that what will stick over the next years is that instant of awful connection, of the burst of impossible information, that bite of the god-like fruit of pure knowledge, of suddenly, involuntarily knowing something you do not know how to know.  

A Thanksgiving Tale

I got an assignment back then to do a Thanksgiving piece for NPR and soldiered off by phone and car to make a little radio story about turkeys.  They raise turkeys in the Central Valley down the hill from our Mariposa house and I figured the audio from a turkey ranch — twenty thousand anxious birds in one place — would carry me a long way. 

Don’t remember much of the finished piece which I recorded on a Sony cassette 110A machine and edited on a Sony reel-to-reel on the living room table.  But I remember this one part.

The manager of the Armour turkey ranch just outside of Planada lived across the highway 140 from his birds, thousands and thousands of anxious birds bred for fast growth and weight gain, and with no skills except to eat.  We stood in his yard looking at them all, in pens just a few yards from the road.  And I asked him didn’t anybody ever steal one of his turkeys and what did he do about turkey rustling.   

Oh, he said, it pretty much takes care of itself.  I’ll see a car stop and a guy’ll run over to the pen and grab a bird and throw it in his car.  Then, maybe quarter mile down the road, I’ll see the car pull over, the door open, and the bird come flying out.  

Still makes me smile, imagining inside that station wagon, a freaked out 25-30 pound bird screeching, flapping and shitting, kids crying, wife screaming.  

Happy Thanksgiving.

why I no longer work for NBC News ever

Back then, early oughts, I was field producing live shots for the Today Show.  Not much money, but kinda fun way to spend an early morning.  Usually pretty good stories, and the glamor.  That too.  So one night in April the crew booker called from Burbank – this would be maybe 8 pm Pacific – said there was a Rasputin dog (my language, not her's) in Clear Lake and that Matt (Lauer, we're all on first names here) Matt wanted to interview the dog.  

Okay.  The story was that the dog, a 10 month old female mixed breed named Dosha, had slipped out of her yard collarless and been hit by a car.  And the responding police officer, seeing the animal as badly injured and in distress, had shot the dog.  In the head.  Put her down.  

Dosha's body, in an orange body bag, was put in the animal morgue cooler or something.  Whatever, a bit later, couple of hours I think, the shelter staff found Dosha standing up in the refrig, still in the body bag, and quite alive.  (The officer's a very bad shot, Dosha's vet whispered to me later.)  I have met this animal and can say that all things considered she was in pretty good shape and in a better mood than I would have been.  

So Matt wanted to do this story and I went to Clear Lake, arriving a bit after midnight Pacific.  We were to go live at 7:40 Eastern with dog and vet.

At the vet's office where the dog was and where we, the Today Show, had booked an interview with the vet, there were two satellite trucks.  One for me, along with two cameras, and one for ABC GMA.  Competition isn't unusual and I said hey to the GMA guys whom I knew and didn't think much of it.  However, a bit on when I told the Today Show producer in New York – a person sitting in a warm office with plenty of coffee and snacks – when I told her that there was an ABC crew in Clear Lake too, well, she went batshit.  She told me I represented NBC News! and was to tell the ABC crew that we, Today, had an exclusive.  I told her that I guess I'd do that but that it wouldn't work and that they'd think I was stupid.  But, you know, I went in where they were setting up and told the GMA producer that Today had an exclusive.  It went about as I said -- they thought I was a jerk and they continued to set up.

24 Hours to Life in Reno

First off, the statute of limitations on my crime has surely expired and one little inter-state move of a ‘quantity for sale’ of marijuana probably doesn’t matter as much now as it sure as hell did in 1970.   Second, jail is weird space.  If you haven’t been in, there’s no way to get it.  Time, logic, reality, and the very meaning of innocence is altered there.  This is the story of how one hippie first learned about the weirdness.  

This is July 1970.  The kid with me in the van knew about the dope I was carrying too, which could well have been a problem.  When I met him he was hitchhiking on I-80 outside of Salt Lake, headed west to Berkeley, part of the pulse of young folks toward California.  God bless them.  I picked him up.  He was a runaway, 16 I think, from Michigan.  We talked and smoked some of the dope and drove my green hippie van west, toward Berkeley, toward Reno.  

Now at that time — you have to imagine — the Interstate did not detour around every city and town it came to.  It went thru them on Main Street. In 1970 the Interstate had intersections and cross traffic and stop lights.  This story I’m telling surely would not have happened in later times. Because these days I would rocket right around Reno at Interstate speed.  Because nowadays I would not really ever have been in Reno, driving on the street.  Because  these days I would have dropped the kid at a freeway ramp and just gone on my small-time way down 395 toward Lee Vining and the back way to Yosemite. Because it was the Reno cop who had seen the bulletin about the armed robbery in South Lake Tahoe and it was he who, reasonably it turned out, figured that I and the kid were probably the armed robbers he was looking for and followed us down the street in the middle of Reno.