things I learned

Fifty years of deadlines, inexorable, mostly, enforced by unreasonable people, then by body memory. Some things stick.

– I back-time everything. I can not walk from a room to another without considering anything that could be done efficiently at the same time.

– Situational awareness is a godly- and life-saving virtue.  I notice things that shouldn’t be and are, also that should be but aren't. Ya never know where a story might be. 

– I know how long five seconds is. I’ve been yelled at about two seconds. And I can count off 20 seconds almost unerringly. Actually, in a TV editing suite, a thirtieth of a second is a real unit of time. Crazy.

– The rule of three.  In writing opinion pieces at least three facts or examples or pieces of evidence are necessary to make a point seem solid. A trend piece can’t just have two examples. Gotta be three at least. 

 

Gatekeepers

This is a real conversation between my friend Stanhope and his new boss on Stan’s first day in a Chicago newsroom.

Boss: “Does your mother love you?”

Stan: “Uh, yes?”

Boss: “How do you know?”

Stan: “[?]”

Boss: “Ask her.”

So Stan called his mother at home and asked her. She confirmed that she did actually love him, and Stan reported back to his new boss, who said, “Now you know.” It was a ritual of teaching the boss ran on many of his new kids. Sy Hersh tells the same story.

A few blocks away from where Stan worked, I was an assistant to the City Editor of a big Chicago newspaper, answering the phone at night. A copy kid. The bottom rung on the ladder of newspapering. We were covering an airplane crash and had a reporter, Mel, on the scene. Mel called in and I talked to him.

Mel: “There are four dead.”

Me to my boss: “Mel says there are four dead.”

My boss, without looking up: “Ask him how he knows.”

Me on phone: “He wants to know how you know.”

Mel: “Fireman told me.”

Boss: “Ask him how many bodies he saw.”

I was being taught to think like a reporter: What do we know and how do we know it. 

Newspaper and TV news reporting has regular disciplined procedures, to figure out what is a fact, what’s true. There are formulas for publishing information that readers, you and I, can judge for ourselves. So, in the paper you might read that this or that happened “according to police” or some such phrase.  On TV you see for yourself, a sound bite from a person. The process creates a kind of chain of evidence for the ‘fact.’ The reporters and editors have collected the evidence, organized it, presented it. You and I can judge for ourselves.

“Jack and Jill went up the hill,” Jill’s mother said.

Now you know. 

This discipline, with its extraordinary strengths and some serious faults, made for a kind of authority, trust. As best we could make it, what was in the paper was true and complete. If we weren’t sure, it didn’t get in. My Chicago Sun-Times published five editions over 12 hours every day, the first, the bulldog, about 4:30 in the afternoon, the last at dawn the next morning. Across Michigan Avenue our competition, The Chicago Tribune, was doing the same thing, their versions coming out about 15 minutes before or after ours. One of us copy kids would go to the Trib loading doc to get copies (‘hot off the press’) and our editors would page thru, looking for anything they had and we didn’t -- a person’s age, a quote, an entire story.  Three hundred sixty five days a year.  The process was meant to ensure that you could count on what you read in the paper.  The process was professional, competitive, disciplined -- our  best effort to see that what we printed was true.

Time passed. I moved up the professional ladder. 

The end of a magazine assignment, after weeks, sometimes months of reporting and writing, is the fact checker. After editors and I have our go, I meet with the person who makes me prove every assertion, fact, and quote in the story. Who told you that? -- give me the phone number to confirm. What was that document? --  I’ll need a copy. Let me hear the interview tape.  The checker is a compulsive second brain focused on getting everything right. Annoying and difficult as it was, it made me a better writer, and a much more careful reporter. What the fact checking process meant to all of us is that if it was in print in a respectable professional journal, it was very likely to be accurate. 

Of course I made mistakes in my working life. While I was reporting on California farm labor for a news magazine, a PR guy lied to me and I believed him and wrote something untrue. It was more than 40 years ago and I have not forgotten. A friend -- still a friend -- gave me a video tape of very ugly clear cut logging which wasn’t where she claimed and my TV station got busted by the misrepresented logging company. Once, cutting a documentary, I let a video editor talk me into using an audio mix that was fundamentally unreal. Corrections followed. But beyond that, I was wrong and regret it. 

And worse. All those years ago in Chicago, one night on the desk I took a call from a guy, late. He was drunk, and behind the alcohol he was upset. The ice cream trucks working the hot Chicago streets, he told me, were selling junk food. “There’s no real milk in the ice cream. No milk.” He was almost weeping. I can still hear him. The children were sold unhealthy food. It was true but I blew him off. I mean, who knew?

At the campus paper I ran in Chicago, terrified Iranian foreign students tried to convince me their own government was spying on and threatening them. Come on. Undercover agents of the Shah of Iran? Skulking around the corridors of my university? Red Squad Chicago cops helping them? Seriously? I didn’t believe them, but of course it was all completely true, and some of those brave young men ... what happened to them back in Iran, what were the consequences? I don’t know but I’m so sorry I was naive, that I didn't bother to look into what was true. 

I’m more careful now but, folks, the Internet and some print and broadcasters aren’t.  Unlike the old newspapers, the Walter Cronkites of back then, there is often no process to make even the smallest effort to know if something’s true. We’re on our own. A Facebook Friend of ours told us a couple of weeks ago that it is “well known that Dr. Fauci has a financial interest in the Moderna vaccine.”  Well known and also not true. 

           As you write the Facebook note or letter to the editor or tell the friend, just keep asking yourself, “How do I know?” It’s a start. 

– Mariposa, June 2025

– posted to blogger 9/23/26

–

 

   There is a place on Earth – sort of real, sort of theoretical – called Point Nemo. And I love this… place. I will never get there. Very few humans have. It’s not much anyway, even were I, or anyone to get there. I mean, there really wouldn’t be much of a way to know you were at Point Nemo because there’s nothing there.

   Point Nemo is the place on Earth that is farthest from land. Nearly 1700 miles in any direction, as it turns out. The Point is in the South Pacific… somewhere. Here’s a picture.

   Point Nemo is so remote that the closest human to it is probably an astronaut on the International Space Station when it passes over about once a day. The ISS is only 200 some miles from Point Nemo. I love that.

   Point Nemo was invented or created or identified, I suppose, by a Croation engineer barely thirty years ago. He was never there. Just figured it out with math. He named the place for Captain Nemo, a famous fictional explorer from the book, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” by Jules Verne.

   Another thing to know about Point Nemo’s very large and vacant neighborhood is that it is where we crash much of our space junk. When a no-longer-useful satellite, for example, is plunging toward, say Los Angeles, is it redirected to the place on Earth where it is least likely to hit anything valuable. Or anything, really. That’s the lonely Pacific Ocean around Nemo so the bottom of the sea there is littered – this is true – with old, charred pieces of our space programs. Hundreds of them. 

   So, there are a few hundred words about a place that hardly exists, that was only quite recently ‘discovered’, and that very few of us will ever see – or want to see – but is somehow wonderful.

  

      Mariposa, September 2026

posted to blogger 9/23/26

 

The Golden Rule

The ever-alert San Francisco television news desk where I worked in the 1970s sent me of a morning to a San Mateo highschool campus to cover a nude-in. The event had been announced with a press release, so why not.

California at that time had not quite settled on a dress code and not being at all dressed was, while not exactly legal, it wasn’t actually “wrong” either. At least in the right places. “Political” demonstrations were protected, and construed very broadly. A Bay Area high school might or might not be a right place to express …. something, freedom, dissent, something. Also, nudity per se. 

So we all, representatives of much of the Bay Area press, responded, including me.

By this time in my life in San Francisco I was sensitive to the process of ‘announcement as action’.  It was clearly no longer necessarily required to do; sometimes one only had to say. The political environment was VERY busy and rich. A plan could easily be enough to make a point. 

So I arrived at the high school not really expecting nakedness. And somehow I got that message out, because killing a minute at a men's room urinal, a teen aged kid stepped in next and told me he was one of the organizers, and that the event was …. well, we, the press, were the event. Funny. We could so easily be had. Wanna see the firehouse dog run? Just ring the bell.

—----------

On a freezing day in January 1982 a poorly de-iced Air Florida 727 fell out of the air on takeoff from Washington, clipped a bridge and crashed into the Potomac River. Most of the people on the plane and some on the bridge were killed. (Incidentally, his rescue efforts made a folk hero out of Lennie Skutnik, who I never met but of whom I have written elsewhere.)

The additionally awful thing about Air Florida flight 90 is that while the disaster was obvious and public in Washington, official-types in Tampa where it very briefly headed, were clueless. Nobody in the company or the government told anybody in Tampa that Flight 90 was in the river, not the air. So in the two and a half hours that first responders and news crews were busy doing catastrophe in DC, happy people were arriving at Tampa airport to pick up their relatives and friends.  These two worlds intersected when Tampa reporters began to arrive at the airport to interview the grieving who themselves did not yet know of their loss. 

I went to Tampa shortly thereafter to look at the behavior of the news people and the ugly failures of the system that made for the mess.  You know, reporters did exactly what we are trained to do, which, stripped of context, looked outrageously cruel – “how do you feel,” to people who did not yet know they were supposed to be devastated. 

My favorite though, was a young man in a bar near the airport who saw news of the crash on TV and realized that we, the news machine we, would need mourners, so he went to the airport and volunteered to be one, inventing a ‘friend’ on the downed plane to grieve. He was interviewed and quoted widely. Hard to fault him, really, for trying to be helpful, for recognizing a generic role and attempting to fill it.

 —---------

Guy set himself on fire in Anniston Alabama one night, for a TV news camera, in a drunken protest against unemployment. He lived to regret it, as did the two young TV newsmen who were his only witnesses, and his excuse.  

This was in May of 1983, and I went to Anniston to write about it for a show I was doing with Hodding Carter in New York. Here’s the sequence – drunk, unemployed guy calls the TV station four times on a Friday night offering an interview and self-immolation; finally the station sends  an intern and the sports camera guy over, more or less to get rid of a pest; guy in fact sets himself on fire and the TV guys and late arriving cops extinguish the flames. 

I met the two TV guys who were being generally condemned by most of the country. I was more sympathetic and wrote later for Hodding that they were astounded when the guy did actually spark the fire, that before that they were simply video-taping a press statement – albeit a drunken one. They gave me the tape which had caused so much regret, and I still have it. 

—------

The language I wrote for Hodding after the Anniston thing, and that I have thought of so often since, was this: that the message we news people have put out is that if you do something weird enough, we will put you on TV or in the paper for it.  Click bait before we had the term, the unspoken Golden Rule of news media. Everybody kind of knows it, including the burned guy, the Tampa bar fly, and the high school kid in San Mateo.

And Donald Trump. He knows too.

Tom DeVries

Mariposa, July 2026

uploaded 9/23/26

 

My Trip to Reno

First off, the statute of limitations 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.  

The kid with me in the van knew about the dope too, which could well have been a problem.  When I met him he was standing by the highway 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 on 80, toward Berkeley, toward Reno.  

Now at that time — you have to imagine — the Interstate did not go around every city and town it came to.  It often stopped, or certainly stopped looking like an Interstate and while it went down Main Street it had intersections and cross traffic and stop lights.  No Beltways; this story surely would not have been 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 I would have dropped the kid at a 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 robbers and followed us down the street in the middle of Reno.  

Seeing him back there spooked me, I can tell you, and I blew a jog in the street, ran into a dead end, and they pulled me down right there in that blind street.  A lot of cops cars all of a sudden, with lights and shotguns and revolvers and noise.  They got me out of the hippie van so fast the engine was still running and I was on my face in the gravel.  As was the kid, whom I never saw again but owe a large thank you.  Thank you very much, kid.  You did me right.

Believing me to be an armed robber from South Lake Tahoe, they took me to the Reno jail.  Because they were so certain, they did not search the hippie camper van, only around the front seats where I could reach.  Not the back where my stuff was, including the mayonnaise jar full of grass which the kid and I both knew about and didn’t say anything.  

They put me in the jail cell for the really bad guys, three of us, one guy who seemed to sleep pretty much of the time, one young guy who talked a lot, and me, the hippie armed robber.  There is a kind of reverse status in a jail, and we were at the top of this upside down thing — the baddest.  Including the talking guy who was under arrest for attempted murder.  What he did during the day and night we were together there was tell me various stories about what he had done… or not done… around this attempted murder.  What the cops did was entertain themselves by dropping by our low-rider cell to tell the Talking Guy how poorly his victim was doing in the hospital.  Which understandably freaked him out and made him talk more.

The attempted murder was with a knife, I gathered, and the details of his various scenarios is lost to me now, alas, but the theme of them was the same:  exculpatory, to one degree or another.  The stories did… I would say ‘vary’, but what they did was totally contradict each other.  He would narrate the evening and its events, each time trying out a version that reduced his responsibility or eliminate it, each time listening to how this telling sounded, whether it might possibly work to get him out of this awful jam.  It wasn’t his knife.  The other guy started it.  He was defending himself.  There was someone else there, but absent when the police arrived. I don’t think Talking Guy had a whole lot more experience with criminality than I did. He not once acknowledged that his story was…. fluid, and consequently not credible. Each iteration was presented without guile, without reference to the previous, completely different, version of ten or twenty minutes before.  Fresh.  Virginally honest.  That long night both of us spent stunned, and talking.  Figuring out something incomprehensible.

Jails alter conventional reality.  I say we spent the ‘night’ but there were no windows.  No clocks.  My watch belonged to the property clerk.  Meals are scheduled to suit bureaucratic kitchen staffing — within one eight hour shift, I suppose.  So I don’t really know when anything happened, or how long it took.  And I know sometime that night they brought the new prisoner, the Big Guy, to join us.  But it seemed a welcome new misery to distract from ours.  Briefly.  He told us this story.

Big Guy was a walk-away from a mental institution in California, he said.  He’d gotten as far as Reno on a freight train and took a break from travel.  Sometime after that — a day, a week — he decided that he’d made a mistake leaving the ‘Home’ in California, that he wanted to go back, and that he wanted his medication.  So, he said, he had approached a police officer in Reno and explained all this.  Presumably Reno cops, indeed officers at any destination resort, have heard pretty much every story and learned to ignore them. They blew the Big Guy off too.  Whatever else mentally was wrong with him, Big Guy was resourceful, so when the officer didn’t respond to the story, Big Guy right away threw a handy street  trash can through a store window.  That the police did not ignore and Big Guy was arrested and put in the Reno jail drunk tank.

Of course, in the drunk tank he was really not much closer to getting his meds and transport back to the California institution than he had been.  Big Guy figured that out soon enough and when the keepers took him to be photographed and finger printed, he trashed the place, just smashed everything.  That’s when Big Guy was put in with us, the bad-ass group of murderers and armed robbers.  As I digested and considered his story I began to realize I shared  Big Guy’s interest in getting his meds and even transport to California.  He was much bigger than I and there wasn’t much besides me in the cell worth throwing or trashing if he needed to make his point again.  Pretty soon whenever a keeper walked by the cell I was standing right there at the bars with Big Guy seconding his demand for his medication.  You can probably imaging how fucking little they cared, about Big Guy, me, or any of our problems.  

One of my problems was my crime.  In the course of things I had begun to think hard about how — though I had been hundreds of miles from South Lake Tahoe in Utah — how I didn’t remember the robbery at all, how the mind plays strange tricks.  I began to think about how I might have actually committed the robbery I was in jail for.  

Later I figured there were a couple or three reasons for this, and it has remained a useful piece of experience in my life:  jail is a very weird space.  First, the police and the other guys in jail assumed I had done the robbery.  They’d done what they were there for.  Why should I be special.  Once I was actually cuffed and in the back of the cage car, the officer who arrested me was kind of nice.  I suppose I was good career news for him: a good bust.  So, you know, you’re surrounded by people who believe this one thing — your guilt.  It’s very much like the religious cults I ran into in my life. 

Plus I could never again hear about a person confessing to a crime without remembering that jail is very strange, its own reality, and that once upon that time, I myself, a sober and sentient adult, sat in a locked room wondering if this amazing, impossible, unbelievable thing they were saying, could somehow in fact be possible.  I have never since taken at face value any alleged ‘confession’ to police by a child…. or anybody, really.

Second, the investigating officers read me the bulletin from South Lake Tahoe upon which I was followed and arrested.  My own APB.  And damn if it didn’t sound like me.  Two young hippie types.  Green hippie van.  This and that.  Cops read me the bulletin and sat there looking at me.  I had to say…. well…. far out….

In fact, both I and the police knew, when busted I was carrying an American Express Card and police press credentials from San Francisco.  They’d already talked to my boss there.  They just assumed that I was a secret smack junky and that’s why I, with a respectable job and all, was sticking up a pet store in South Tahoe.  Confronted with the San Francisco professional Tom, they didn’t miss a beat. In the circumstance the Other Tom gave me little comfort either.

So I sat in the cell, losing touch with out-of-jail reality, caught up in the psychiatric dilemma of the Big Guy, and to a lesser extent with the failing health of the Talking Guy’s stab victim.  About that point, whatever time of day or night it was, I got a phone call.

Because I was lawyerless, the keepers let me take a call from a lawyer at the booking desk.  Not private or anything, but very nice of them.  My Berkeley housemate Danny arranged the call from lawyer Stan and for this I will always be grateful.  The phone call was the first moment of rebooting my brain, and the first step on getting me out of the Reno jail. Altogether a good thing.  This is what happened.

Stan told me that friend Danny had put ten thousand dollars in cash in a briefcase and was at that moment driving toward Reno to bail me out.  I told Stan that the Reno police had towed my hippie camper away and that — more or less quoting — I love that car, Stan, and I’m afraid they’ll tear the shit out of it.  Do you know what I mean, Stan?  He got it.  And Stan, my hero, told the police that he didn’t care what they thought, they couldn’t legally search the car anymore.  And the Reno cops caved.  They didn’t search the car and consequently they didn’t find the mayonnaise jar with a felonious amount of marijuana in it.  (And, to rehearse my thank you, the kid, by this time in juve and his father on the way out to drag him back to Michigan, the kid did not tell the authorities about the dope either.  Which was a huge favor for somebody he didn’t know.  And it surely crossed his mind to trade me for not having to go back to Michigan and start running away all over.  God bless him and I hope somebody in life did something wonderful for him.)  

Anyway, between the kid, Stan the lawyer, and sloppy police work, I did not have to spend a lot of money and time in Nevada courtrooms, and maybe not a few months in a Nevada prison.  That was very good.

I don’t know what happened to the murderer.  Or the Big Guy from the mental institution.  Good things, I hope, but probably not.  Good things did happen to me.  Mostly I got out.  About the time Danny got to Reno, in a sports car with a brief case full of cash and a very pretty girl, the police gave up on my case.  The robbery victims in South Tahoe could not identify me from the picture of me taken in the Reno jail with the camera equipment the Big Guy trashed a bit later.  Danny and all that cash was the last straw.  They gave me my watch and wallet, charged me thirty-five bucks for impounding my car and kicked me loose.  Danny, the pretty girl and I had a very good dinner at a casino and he went home to Berkeley.  I went on down 395 to the back way to Yosemite, the very way I had intended 24 hours earlier.  

I remember driving through the high country of the Park the next day, by myself, singing at the top of my voice.    

-30-

The CIA and Me

When my daughter Lauren was born we lived in Philadelphia and nine of our best friends were secretly working for the CIA.  

It was different then, in the early 60s: things were hopeful, the Vietnam war was a whisper, the government was not the enemy.  Working for the government wasn’t so…. suspect, wrong.  Government then was still ‘us,’ not yet ‘them,’ at least if you were a middle class white person.  John Kennedy and even Lyndon Johnson were generally seen as positive figures, and we were all working, we thought, for the same things.  Economic and social justice, civil rights, peace, progress.  But I certainly did not know that nine of my friends were secret agents, and that the office I shared with them was a CIA front, and that money I raised to support a national organization of campus newspapers was from the CIA too.  I thought my friends, while we had dinner, and they played with our baby daughter, and we traveled and argued and planned and shared, I thought we were all doing the same things.  I thought I knew them.

Yale Press has just published my friend Karen Paget's book, Patriotic Betrayal, about that time, and those people.   A history of the entanglement with CIA, why and how the lies were born and grew.  I have just a small piece, what happened to me. Because for three years or so, before I knew what was going on and after, it was a very large part of my life.

Works for Me

It is my current opinion that in all matters of faith, including religion, politics and medicine, the limit of avowal should be "it works for me."  Beyond that comes pressure, coercion, violence and war, serious over-reactions for systems that after all include large impacts of the psychological.  In other words, maybe most, possibly all of the evidence for deeply held beliefs is the effect of placebo.