Looking for sportswriters and editors who crossed over to the news side

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Through much of my career, I never quite appreciated the sports staff. The sports desk was over there in its own corner or maybe even a separate room or suite. Unlike the cops beat or business or education or even the courts coverage that filled the “real” news.

But it did produce some of the best political writers and editors in the business.

Their perspective, facing two teams, essentially – especially baseball, with its daily games in season, and delivering on tight deadlines – provided a character-based focus in contrast to those of us who were more policy driven.

Its baseball angle for some fine writers first came to my attention in John Updike’s prose and later David Halberstam, though they didn’t have newspaper experience.

The drama of contests, strategies, determination, hard work, fairness, and a vision is central in their work, along with the reality that so much of the field is about losers who persist and sometimes come out on top or have lasting influence, especially within the realm of a hometown team. Not a bad paradigm.

These former sportswriters and editors were around me throughout my career, though I never kept a list and now wish I had. On the national scene in my time, though, I can point to Charles P. Pierce, Mike Lupica, Ward Just, and Mike McAlery as prime examples of those who broadened their game.

Curiously, I haven’t seen that crossover occurring much from a football foundation. Perhaps that game’s more like a weekly television series or shouting match than the realities of a daily grind.

I’ll let up for now before I’m playing out of my league. But I do want to hear more from others – players and fans alike.

We were awaiting the return of the Raold … and then Hurricane Lee thickened the plot

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We were hoping the Norwegian expedition cruise ship would get better weather than it had last year on its inaugural port-of-call stop in town. It was greeted by a blustery deluge. The event planned for Friday was to be the ship’s first stop in the USA for the Pole-to-Pole, four- ocean cruise that originated in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Here’s how it looked last year in some really nasty wind and rain. Now I’m getting superstitious.

The trajectory of Hurricane Lee is increasingly looking like a landfall somewhere near us, and that had the Norwegians deciding to change course and bypass Eastport.

However, it’s also caused two other cruise ships to head for shelter here, both return visitors who appreciated their previous welcome.

We do hope our electrical power holds up in the coming storm and that Lee veers more toward the Nova Scotia side of the latest forecast.

America’s most celebrated wildlife artist was a Frenchman

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Or more accurately, the bastard son of a Frenchman in Haiti.

Yet, despite the iconic honor given his name, few have seen his legendary work in its full glory.

I’m speaking, of course, of John James Audubon, in the anglicized version of his name.

While I had viewed his work behind glass framing in art museums, nothing prepared me for my hands-on encounter with the four folio print volumes. That happened in Indiana University’s rare book Lilly Library when a librarian interrupted to ask if I would help her return two of the volumes to the cart so she could take them by elevator back to the stacks.

Yes, they really did need two people to move. As I’m seeing now, the books measured about 29½ inches by 39½, otherwise known as double elephant paper, the 435 prints being the same size as the original drawings.

We decided to take a peek and were both blown away. It was as if the birds had been pressed full-size onto the plate. You could actually see the veins in each feather. And that was, it turns out, a copy of the original. Oh, yes, and each species was presented full size, with some favored vegetation.

As for the color? Unbelievable. You have no idea how much is lost through any glass.

We both admitted it was too much for a single viewing.

Well, we had an acquaintance who was terrified of blue jays.

Now, for ten more facts.

  1. As an 18-year-old, Jean-Jacques Audubon was sent to Pennsylvania on a false passport to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s army.
  2. A feud originating during his research in Kentucky closed off American support for young Audubon’s work. Instead, his backing came from England, where subscribers underwrote the classic Birds of America.
  3. One bookseller claimed it would never succeed because the book took up an entire table to view and would render other volumes useless.
  4. A reduced-size two-volume collection, a gift from my younger daughter, has me appreciating the radical design and style of many of the images. There was no way, after all, to approximate the original color, yet any approximation opened other dimensions.
  5. He worked from actual specimens he had shot and killed, arranged in lifelike settings.
  6. He did create a controversy regarding the smell of turkey vultures, or what some of us call buzzards.
  7. Some of the birds he discovered remain a mystery.
  8. He’s known mostly by copies of copies or even additional copies, each time diluting the impact of the originals.
  9. He had nothing to do with the national Audubon Society or its Massachusetts and New Hampshire spinoffs.
  10. He’s buried in New York City.

I’ve really been fighting the urge to blast away politically

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

After all, my college degree is in political science and I spent a career in community journalism, meaning I had to stay bottled up and objectively neutral, but what’s been happening in national politics in the Trump era is so appalling that when I sit down to create new blog posts, so many are snide comments along the lines of bumper stickers of a FU nature directed at the idiots.

Not that you’d want to display one on your car without the risk of being shot in the neck. Yes, that’s where the level of civility has sunk in this country.

And then there’s the sense of the futility of building sand castles in the beach in advance of tides that will overrun them.

It ain’t been easy.

So for now, I keep holding my thoughts on all of it in reserve, not that I’ve found any of it easy. As I did in my last decade or so of editing the news.

A recent study suggesting that the party divide is ultimately about males, as in the white male, and everything else. Seriously, I read it in the New York Times.

Like Donald Trump is any role model to emulate in a meaningful relationship?

That’s how low we’ve fallen, friends.

Back in the saddle again (I hope)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty much out of action. Good thing I schedule most of the Barn releases well in advance.

The latest sequence of setbacks started when I knocked a martini glass over, splashing my laptop keyboard, while talking to my wife. And here I’ve been the one to scold others about drinking coffee right over the computers. Ah!

Many of the keys became irreparably stuck or functionless, so it was time to move on to a new machine.

Things were going well with moving my files over from Carbonite until Microsoft’s One Drive got in the way. I have way too many photos for the MS service unless I opt to pay, which I prefer not to do. It’s a Big Brother Is Watching You sort of thing. We’ve been warned.

I wound up taking both machines to a highly recommended computer guy an hour down the road.

Just kept telling myself I wasn’t screwed, not between that and the fact that my beloved elder stepdaughter had given me an external hard drive for one Christmas and I had all but maybe my last two months’ worth of new writing and photos backed up there.

Alas, I’ve also been vigilant about erasing photos from my cell phone gallery and my Google photos. Get the picture? It’s just too easy to get bogged down in all the clutter otherwise.

Being without a computer is an exercise of its own these days. I’m far from the point of using my phone for most of my online browsing and emailing, and I’m definitely not drafting blog posts much less a novel there.

That said, enough of the whining. I’m back.

~*~

Just in time to keep a nervous eye on Hurricane Lee, which may have Eastport as a target. We’d rather Lee go out to sea, well to the east of Nova Scotia to our east. We’ll see.

~*~

The lead headline in the Bangor Daily News the other day touted another development:

Eastport Set to Host Record 15 Cruise Ship Visits This Fall.

The first ship arrives tomorrow, ahead of the autumn foliage.

Quite simply, Eastport is being discovered as a unspoiled destination, in contrast to crowded Bar Harbor or the state’s biggest city, Portland.

Here’s hoping the rogue hurricane season doesn’t disrupt this trend.

~*~

Here’s also hoping for fine conditions at the end of the month and the schooner cruise on my schedule.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of writing I need to attend to, not all of it mine.

Best wishes to you all.

I’m rather glad I waited to read the First Parish history

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As a parent, you really try to keep your kids from a lot of painful encounters but they never listen to your advice, as far as you can tell, which seems to be futile no matter how hard you try, and then the next thing you hear is crying.

Maybe that’s a good thing, if from their experience they learn more than you knew.

There are several books that fall into that model. Had I read them before completing Quaker Dover, I might have overlooked some fresh insights. But now that my book’s out, I really appreciate what else I’m finding.

Donald R. Bryant’s History of the First Parish Church is one of them. The 160-page volume, first published in 1970 and enlarged in 2002, offers another side of my argument of the Quaker invasion in town, for one thing, while relating other parts of the early years with, well, perhaps more discretion. And, my, I do admire his resources and tenacity.

One of my favorite sections is the profile of John Williams that Bryant works into the narrative. Williams, a member of the parish, was, as he says “a visionary, a leader in bringing textile manufacturing to America,” and a cofounder of what became the big millworks in today’s downtown.

But he also became part of the faction of 26 male members who announced in 1828 they were leaving the church to join the Unitarian Society in establishing a new congregation. The split among the heirs of the Puritans into Unitarian or Trinitarian Congregational at the time paralleled a similar one among American Quakers into Orthodox and Hicksite. New England somehow remained Orthodox, as far as Friends went.

The plot within First Parish further thickens over the kind of minister it needed along with the construction of a new, and present, house of worship. What follows in the parish history is a turmoil that includes the changing economics of the town I haven’t yet found in the Quaker Meeting.

Bryant’s history then turns largely to the successive ministers rather than the congregation’s members and their influence in the community.

Still, I appreciate the comments by David Slater at the end of the book. He was First Parish pastor when I first came to Dover and quite engaging. He offered a checklist on how church life was changing that remains relevant, though nothing hit me more than this:

“Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural.”

That takes me back to the Quaker invasion into Dover, back in the mid-1600s.

As for the city’s other congregations? I’m anxious to hear more.