At peace with love and rock-and-roll

There are those we look up to and those from whom we look away.  Robert Moore was both.

Marc Beachamp, a year behind me at Shasta High School but who also followed the journalist's way, wrote a touching column this week about our mutual high school friend.  Some of our classmates gathered at a bar recently to raucously remember the leader of Uncle Robert's Zapp Juice Band.

When that wonderfully-name band played every Northern California high school dance in the late 1960s, Robert was one of the most popular kids in the school.  But he always had  time and conversation for the less-than-popular (me).  My last memory of him was of that big mop of hair topping one of the most angelic smiles I would ever know.

I wandered away from our hometown to pursue a career.  Robert wandered away into his own mind, eventually becoming a shopping-basked-pushing homeless guy on the streets of Redding, CA.

His was a trip I think most of us who grew up then contemplated.  An unfathomable war was sending classmates home in boxes.  The environment was spiraling down into Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.  And nuclear annihilation seemed all be inevitable.
Robert and the band gave us temporary respite from the world.  Not for Robert, however.  He turned to drugs, alcohol and delusions only he knew to get away from it all.

I never came home long enough to see Robert in his bushy-bearded latter stage.  But my friends tell my he was still full up upbeat energy -- until his mind would take a side road.

We all remembered Robert with a "there but the grace of God go I."  But you have to ask, who found the greatest peace?

Upsteam with a good paddle

Saturday Cecile and I joined son Garrett at the Missouri Whitewater Championships near Farmington.  Missouri isn't exactly known for it's towering mountains and crashing streams, but for a few miles on the St. Francis River in the southeast corner of the state, the rapids are rough enough to challenge expert paddlers.

Now you see him, now you don't

Garrett at the ready

To the rescue on the St. Francis

Garrett took up kayaking a few years ago and had become an impressive figure on the foam.  He now shuns the actual races and serves as a safety boater.  He finds an eddy where his kayak will hover magically while the big water roars past him.  He waits until another kayaker overturns or otherwise gets into trouble, then either fires out is "throw-bag" rescue rope or digs deep and paddles out to help.

There are safety boaters every few yards down the river during a race.  That doesn't keep your breath from going away when a boat disappears into the white and only its bottom reappears.  Generally, the unlucky competitor uses his or her paddle to pry themselves upright.  Others pop the rubber seal from around their waists and "swim."  No kayaker likes to admit he "had to swim."

I'd love to dip a paddle, but I'm not sure I'm up to -- or was ever up to -- tackling the torrents.  In the meantime, I'll watch Garrett anytime -- and I'll bet others are glad he's watching them.

Oh Lairdie, Lairdie

My daughter understands -- and shares -- my somewhat odd sense of humor.  Gillian knows, among other things, that I find pretentiousness absolutely hilarious. She also was the prime target for years of the outlandish yarns of my own inflated importance that I have been known to tell with the straightest of faces.

So Gillian found the perfect birthday gift for me this year.  She gave me the deed to a tiny plot in Scotland, the real value of which is that it bestows me with a semi-royal title.

The birthday mail brought me a very official-looking envelope that held a large parchment certificate granting me the right to be called "The Much Honoured Clyde Howard Bentley, Laird of Glencoe."

And I don't even have to wear a kilt.  Until my next birthday present, that is.

I was happily dreaming of proclaiming my lairdship to my students, who would be so impressed they would avert their eyes from Facebook for a few seconds.

Then I noticed the address on that envelope.  I may be laird of the manner in Glencoe, but in the postal world I am "Laid Clyde Bentley."

I thought of a half-dozen comments of questionable taste that I could make about that typo.  But then I realized how how much harder it would have been to live with the title had those editor-less Scots moved their keyboard fumble just one character to the left.

"Lard Clyde Bentley."

Fighting the urge to age

So now I'm 62.  There was a time -- not so long
ago, it seems -- when I thought 60 was synonymous to 6-foot-under.  But though the beard I see in the mirror is gray and I take pills from a SMTWTFS box, I don't feel all that old.

So to hell with age -- it's not all it's cracked up to be anyway (despite the senior discounts).  I'll put on another year believing there will always be another after that.

Two years ago I celebrated my benchmark birthday with a 365 Project for which I took a photo each day of my 60th years.  I enjoyed the project, but I'm not ready to do it again.  Instead I've vowed to rekindle by blog and post at least weekly through my 62nd year.  

As much as my limited talents will allow, I'll try to include a self portrait.  I'm fascinated with how others have taken self-portraiture to an art form.  There are more than 30 groups on Flickr dedicated to self-portrait.  Maybe I'll post there, too.  Or maybe I'll just reflect on it.

I'll be back.

1/365 Happy Birthday to Me, a photo by Clyde Bentley on Flickr.

This is it -- the launch of my 365 Project. I turned 60 today and vowed to take a photo daily for the year. At least I vowed to give it a try.
This is more than a self portrait. That's Jesse Hall and the Mizzou columns in the background -- the second-most photographed scene in Missouri. The domed hall is the administration building and the columns are all that is left from the 1892 fire that destroyed the original university building.
I've been an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism for a decade now. It's the oldest and most famous journalism school in the world. For journalists, a gig here is like getting a work permit to Valhalla.

Uncle Harry, the magic man

For much of my life, I secretly wondered whether Uncle Harry was just a dream.

He was, after all, beyond real. Who else could reach into an absurdly cluttered closet and pull out a gift from a princess or your mother’s childhood toy? Who else could just touch people and leave them both smiling and ache-free? And who else could make dogs speak, birds dance and perfect strangers sing with him in public?

Words can never describe Harry Gibbings. Technically, he wasn’t my uncle but my mother’s cousin – a relationship I’m not sure has an endearment. Some people never even knew him as Harry – just George Gibbings, the globe-trotting BBC cameraman.

Though I loved my grandparents, I saw them only a few times in my life. But Harry wove his way in and out of my entire life. We lived thousands of miles apart and often didn’t see each other for years. Then I would hear an unmistakable “Hello, my boy,” and be back in his world. It was always as if we had parted in mid conversation while he went out of the room for a cup of tea, only take up from where we left without batting an eye.

For my mother, Harry was the bridge to the life she left when we moved to America. He would show up at our house just when she most needed a dose of England and the London she so loved. He could bring the memories, the laughter and the smiles back to his beloved “Dinah” in an instant with that special twinkle in his eye.

Harry’s gift to me, however, was the ability to respect life while bending its rules. I learned from him that a good laugh served the world much better than a smug smile, that most doors were made to go through despite the signs above them, that “neat” was a relative term – and that people really should sing in public.

He may not be listed in the history books nor become a statue in Hyde Park, but Harry brought more living to life than any roomful of statesmen ever has.

Maybe Uncle Harry was not a dream, but just a welcomed bit of magic. Even when he is gone, he is always here.

(Harry Gibbings died in London July 25, 2010, just a few days after his 90th birthday.)

A name on a tag, a memory in my mind

The old saw “memory plays tricks on you” isn’t quite accurate when it comes to high school reunions. Memory just tries its best to please you.

Last night Cecile and I attend the first of two soirées for the 40th reunion of the 1969 Shasta High School class. Viewed with the detachment of a documentary filmmaker, it probably was hilarious. A couple hundred graying (and/or balding and paunchy) grandparents wandered around the spacious hall glancing only briefly at the faces of their classmates. Our eyes were most often fixed on the paper nametags stuck to the dresses and casual-chic shirts we hoped would show we still had “it.”

Not that I viewed it with that detachment. I, too, was reveling in the pleasant warmth of selective memory.

The Class of ’69 will never be the subject of one of those inspiring movies about little guys changing the world. When I ran into Principal Duggan years after graduation, he said our class was more like a bad dream.

But give us a break, Mr. Duggan. Between Vietnam and the barely-cold war, “future” seemed an ethereal term. Unfathomable authority was not limited to the Pentagon. Here in Northern California, girls were sent home for wearing pants, but could wear mini-skirts even shorter than today’s fashions. And Duncan’s puzzling new school motto, “Only the best is worth trying for” seemed to license the cynics of ’69 to ignore the expectations of our elders.

We didn’t need one of Mr. Longnecker’s history-class analyses to understand the significance of Woodstock that summer. We let other classes step up the challenge. We were simply challenging.

But 40 years later, those cynics are wrapping up careers as teachers, carpenters, nurses and cops. Pretty traditional after all, but for those wonderful nametags. One glance at a nametag and that gray-haired lady was the svelte girl who distracted me in English. Another tag put a mop of my buddy’s hair on the shiny-bald head asking me where I was living now.

A few drinks and a few hundred nametags changed a room full of respectable oldsters into a mob of wise-assed (high school) seniors who thumbed their noses at the world.
At least that’s the way I remember it.

Daughter to Dad: It’s a local issue

My recent comparison of newspapers to farms drew a number of comments from fellow journalists, but the one that gave me pause was from an unusual source – my daughter.

“Unusual” is not quite a fair term, as Gillian has never been afraid to voice her opinion. She has not only her father’s genes but also has a journalism degree from the University of Oregon.

Not that she shared my addiction to newsrooms. She instead became an elementary school teacher before tackling the full-time job of raising my rambunctious grandson and his lively little sister. At 31, she and her husband live in Charlottesville, VA, where she balances motherhood with authoring magazine articles and a book.

All that detail is a long way of saying she has a marketing bull’s-eye on her back. Gillian is in the demographic that newspaper advertisers most want – middle-class, college-educated moms who make the buying decisions for their fairly affluent families. And she even lives in the outer suburbs of the East Coast megalopolis.

All of us in the news media want the Gillians. My expert, however, warns that to woo them we need to work a lot harder than just diversifying into niche papers.

“I think that the key is localization not specialization,” she wrote, taking issue with a suggestion by the University of North Carolina’s Phil Meyer. “ I think that the generation that I, and in most ways (her 25-year-old brother) Garrett, are part of are heading to a hyper-local mindset.”

“Hyper-local.” How often have we heard that buzzword at conferences? And how well have we done at actually accomplishing it?

Gillian said she cares not a whit about the plays on Broadway nor who became the new mayor in San Antonio. She concedes that she regularly read the Sunday New York Times … “but it was the first thing to go when our budget got cut -- I could give it up easily.” The Gray Lady was fun, but she found she could get similar content from the plethora of online sites.

Staggering Dad: “Knife in the heart, dear daughter. What’s an old newspaper man to do?”

Impatient Daughter: “How about pay attention?”

“What I can't give up is reading the C-Ville and The Hook, which are focused specifically on Charlottesville. The "local" paper, The Daily Progress, focus too much on county information for me, so I never read it.”

C-Ville and The Hook? Though they sound like Comedy Network shows they in fact are just two of the umpteen non-daily newspapers in the United States that many journalists pretend do not exist. They don’t count among the Newspaper Association of America’s 1,422 – er, make that 1,420 – “real” daily newspapers. No one writes wistful op-ed piece about “what will the world be like without C-Ville?” In fact, I’ve never been able to find more than a guess at how many weekly newspapers are published in the United States.

(Brian Steffens of the small papers’ National Newspaper Association said “more than 7,000” is a safe estimate, though he has 11,000 unverified titles in his database.)

In both my heart and mind, I believe Gillian is right. But that does not mean only the metros are threatened by the recession. Cathy Harding, editor of my daughter’s beloved C-Ville, reminded me that the famous Creative Loafing filed bankruptcy and most other “alternative weeklies” are struggling with the downturn of advertising. No one is immune from the economy.

For some, the economy of small scale is a blessing. The Hook’s editor/publisher Hawes Spencer said the paper is down about 20%, “but that is not a fatal blow.” Like many small papers, everyone on his staff has multiple jobs and the company operates on a pay-as-you-go budget. The Hook has no middle management and no debt. Wouldn’t McClatchy love that?

Enough with the business stuff. What about Gillian’s local focus?

Local does indeed have an enticing appeal, both of her favorite editors said. While the daily paper is event-driven, Harding said the weekly gives readers something they can settle into for a while. They do that by drawing meaning from fact instead of just reporting the facts alone.

Both papers also put great stock in appearance. “If it was just a rag … it wouldn’t have the loyalty it has,” Harding said. C-Ville is “attractive, bright and free.”

Like the Internet. But neither editor holds out much hope for the digital medium. Revenues from their excellent Web sites are “microscopic.” Hard analysis shows the print publication stands up well to the Web readership, but those digital editions are an “investment in reader habit” that awaits the genius who can pull a Web revenue rabbit from the next generation’s hat.

So don’t give up on print, my dear daughter advises.

“I really do hope that there is a stronger future for small, local, even weekly papers,” Gillian wrote. “I think that the generation coming into things is too used to using cnn.com to get their national news to ever really get into the swing of reading one of the big papers.

“But as we age, we will find ourselves wanting to know what our neighbors are up to.”

Eureka! She really did inherit my news nose.