Tag Archives: Beaumont Enterprise

media news, national news

In other news, Challenger blew up 30 years ago today

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Republican presidential candidates are debating at this very moment.

I’m a bit weary from listening to it all, so I’ll recall a tragic moment in U.S. history.

Thirty years ago today, the phone rang on my desk at the Beaumont Enterprise. I answered it. It was my wife, who worked down the street in downtown Beaumont, Texas.

“What’s going on? I just heard the shuttle blew up,” she said.

I turned to my computer, punched up the wire and saw the bulletin: “Challenger explodes.”

I blurted out a curse word and told her “I gotta go!”

I turned on the TV. The video was horrific.

Seventy-three seconds into a flight the shuttle Challenger blew up and seven astronauts were dead . . . in an instant.

We were stunned at our newspaper. We stood there, transfixed by what was transpiring. We heard over and over the radio communication to the Challenger, “Go at throttle up.” Then came the blast. It was followed by silence before the communicator told the world, “Obviously a major malfunction.”

I wouldn’t feel that kind of shock until, oh, the 9/11 attacks 15 years later.

But what happened next at our newspaper was that we would plan to do something the paper hadn’t done since the attack on Pearl Harbor. We decided to publish an “Extra.”

It contained eight pages of text and photos from that ghastly event. It contained an editorial page, which I cobbled together rapidly. I wrote a “hot” editorial commenting on the grief the nation was feeling at that very moment.

We went to press about noon that day and we put the paper in the hands of hawkers our circulation department brought in to sell the paper on the street. It went into news racks all over the city.

Through it all the tragedy reminded us — as if we needed reminding — of how dangerous it is to fly a rocket into Earth orbit.

Of course, it would be determined that a faulty gasket malfunctioned in the cold that morning in Florida. The shuttle fleet would be grounded for a couple of years while NASA figured out a way to prevent such tragedy from happening in the future.

We would feel intense national pain, of course, in February 2003 when the shuttle Columbia would disintegrate upon re-entry over Texas, killing that crew as well — including the mission commander, Amarillo’s very own Air Force Col. Rick Husband.

They both brought intense pain to our nation.

Challenger’s sudden and shocking end, though, remains one of those events where we all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.

And to think that some Americans actually thought those space flights were “routine.”

 

national news

This wasn’t a parody

The Onion takes great pleasure in offering parodies of news events.

The link attached here talks about a black man who supports flying the Confederate flag — and who has just tripled his media appearance rates to tell  his story.

http://www.theonion.com/article/black-man-support-confederate-flag-triples-his-med-50727

It’s a hilarious send-up of a current news story.

However, it brings to mind a woman I met many years ago while covering a governor’s race in Louisiana. If only she had been pulling my leg at the time. She wasn’t.

The year was 1991. I was working in Beaumont, in the southeastern corner of Texas, about 25 miles from the Louisiana border. The Beaumont Enterprise was covering “regional news” back then, and still sold newspapers all the way to Lake Charles, La. I thought I could get an interesting commentary out of the governor’s race in the state next door, so I ventured across the Sabine River and went to Vinton, La., where voters were casting ballots.

The two candidates were the Democrat, former Gov. Edwin Edwards and the Republican, David Duke — yes, that David Duke, the Ku Klux Klansman.

I went to a polling place and talked to voters walking away. I approached a middle-aged African-American woman and asked her about the race — expecting fully to get the kind of response I’d heard from other African-Americans about a contest between a colorful former governor and the intensely controversial opponent, Duke.

What I got damn near bowled me over.

The woman said she voted for Duke!

The KKK stuff didn’t bother her, she said. His white supremacist views weren’t the deal-breaker, she explained.

Why did you vote for him? I asked. It was his stand on welfare, she said.

I truly thought she was kidding. I pressed her some more about her political leanings and she insisted that she was sincere. David Duke was her man because he wanted to get people off welfare, that she was tired of paying for other people’s food and housing. If they really wanted to work, she said, they could find a job.

Wow! Who knew?

Looking back on 24 years on that amazing encounter, I can read The Onion parody and wonder: Is it really a joke?

Hmmm. Yeah. It is.

 

legal news, local news, State news

Grand jury reform arrives in Texas

Way back when I arrived in Texas, in 1984, the newspaper where I started working had just begun an editorial campaign to change the way the state impaneled grand juries.

The Jefferson County criminal justice system had come under fire over suspicions that a grand jury might have been seated to get back at political foes of a district judge. Our newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise, disliked the jury commissioner system and we called for a change to select grand juries the way the state seats trial juries — using the voter registration rolls.

We finally persuaded the county’s two criminal district judges to adopt a random selection method.

Well, this week, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that makes it a requirement to seat grand juries in a random method.

http://www.texastribune.org/2015/06/19/abbott-signs-grand-jury-reform-legislation/

It’s a good day for the state’s criminal justice system.

As the Texas Tribune reports: “Under House Bill 2150, the state will no longer use the outdated system that lets judge-appointed commissioners pick jurors, a nationally uncommon practice that critics say is rife with potential for conflicts of interest.”

The old system allowed judges to pick jury commissioners, usually friends, to find grand jurors. It’s been called a “pick a pal” system. Friends pick friends, who then might be friends with the judge whose court has jurisdiction.

The “potential for conflicts of interest” surely did exist.

I once served on a grand jury, in Randall County, that was picked by the old method. We had an uneventful term, meeting every other week for several months. I learned a lot about my community.

My participation as a grand juror, though, all but eliminated me from consideration for a trial jury, District Attorney James Farren told us, as we then would be seen as “pro-prosecution” by defense counsel.

That’s fine.

But I’m still quite glad to see the Texas Legislature enact this long-needed reform, which follows the model used in the vast majority of other states.

If a randomly selected trial jury is qualified to sentence someone to death, then a randomly selected grand jury ought to be qualified to determine whether the crime should be prosecuted in the first place.

political news, State news

Let’s not cherry-pick Scripture

Read this editorial carefully. It’s a brief but brilliant lecture on how politicians shouldn’t selectively quote Scripture to make a cheap political point.

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/opinions/editorials/article/Gov-Perry-s-view-reflects-poorly-on-all-of-us-5974944.php

The target of this opinion from the Beaumont Enterprise is the lame-duck Texas governor, Rick Perry, who told the Washington Post that Scripture tells us there always will be poor folks. As the Enterprise noted, Perry’s comment to the Post is just another way of saying “What’s the use?” in helping the poor.

The editorial also notes that Jesus possibly was referring to an Old Testament reference that calls on us to reach out and help the poor whenever possible.

Conservatives and liberals alike have this annoying habit of turning to the Holy Word and cherry-picking passages, taking them out context, and turning them into their political ammunition to fire at their adversaries. Conservatives use the Bible to argue against gay rights, abortion rights and whether to teach evolution in public schools. Liberals use the Bible to argue for helping the poor.

I’ve always been leery of those who keep citing Scripture — Old and New Testament alike. It’s always good to examine all of what Jesus told his followers or what the prophets were saying many centuries before Jesus Christ’s birth.

Gov. Perry’s misuse of a biblical statement is just one more example that we must not follow.

 

International news

Ebola fighters get too much credit

I’m not prone to critiquing Time magazine’s annual Person of the Year selection.

The choices don’t usually get me too worked up — either positively or negatively. This year’s choice is a bit different.

Time chose to honor the Ebola fighters, the medical professionals who went to West Africa to battle the killer disease.

Of all the choices Time could have made, the editors could have chosen someone with more, um, immediate and palpable impact.

As my pal Tom Taschinger wrote in the Beaumont Enterprise, “Granted, these men and women are doing noble deeds. But Ebola has faded from the epidemic that will end Life As We Know It to an overhyped cable-TV story.”

Indeed, this story was overplayed from the beginning, particularly the “outbreak” in the United States that never occurred.

Here’s one of the posts I published on my blog about the coverage:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/10/16/shep-gets-it-exactly-right-on-ebola/

One man flew to Dallas from Liberia; he was carrying the virus with him. He got sick, checked into a first-rate hospital in the Dallas area, but then died. Another man died in Nebraska. A nurse got infected in Dallas, went to Atlanta, and was declared Ebola free.

That’s it.

The disease has receded from the headlines and from CNN, MSNBC and Fox news coverage.

As Taschinger noted in his excellent column, occasionally Time picks a notorious figure as its Person of the Year — such as Ayatollah Khomeini or Timothy McVeigh. It has leaned more in recent years to feel-good selections. I agree that they’re important, too. But let’s get real here. Is Ebola really a worldwide threat?

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/opinions/columns/article/THOMAS-TASCHINGER-The-Person-of-the-Year-is-a-5969800.php

The magazine can do better next year.

 

national news

Boys kept out of White House queries

President Obama’s final press conference of 2014 made news in an unexpected manner.

Eight reporters asked him questions in the White House Press Room. All of them were women. Obama said at the outset he had checked his “naughty or nice” list when developing his list of questioners.

I guess the men among the White House press corps had been naughty.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-answers-female-reporters–questions-only-at-year-end-press-conference-212200355.html

What’s the statement here? I haven’t a clue.

One of the other interesting elements of the roster of questioners was that most of them rarely, if ever, get a chance to ask the president something at one of these events. They were “unknowns.”

The “big hitters” among the White House press cadre — the men and women who get the front-row seats — comprise the major broadcast and cable news networks, along with The Associated Press, the pre-eminent print news outlet. They sat there stone-faced while Obama called out names of people sitting in the back of the room.

Actually, I thought it was rather cool for the president to call on those who don’t usually participate in these televised news conferences. It gives others whose job is to report on presidential events a chance to put their own questions on the record with the Leader of the Free World.

Enough of the major-media echo chamber, thank you very much.

***

A memory came to mind just as I was typing this post about “no-name journalists.” Here goes.

Back in the 1980s, NASA announced a plan to send a working journalist into space aboard a space shuttle mission. It then put the word out for any journalist who was interested to apply.

I applied for a spot on a shuttle mission. What an amazing opportunity to report first hand, up close, in real time the immense thrill of orbiting Earth from outer space. Hey, I could do this.

As it turned out, NASA scrubbed its “civilian in space” after the Challenger disaster in January 1986, when school teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with her crewmates.

But after I submitted my application to NASA, I was sharing my desire to fly in space with a colleague of mine at the Beaumont Enterprise, where I was working at the time. I mentioned to my friend, Rosemary Harty, that NASA likely would go with some big-name network TV news celebrity — someone like Walter Cronkite.

“Oh, no they won’t, John,” Rosey said. “They’re going to pick a nobody, just like you.”

 

political news, Uncategorized

This story went untold: Edwin Edwards's loss

While most of the U.S. political press was fixated on the U.S. Senate race in Louisiana, another contest ended and virtually no one cared about its conclusion.

Except me.

The Sixth Congressional District race featured a contest between Republican Garret Graves and Democrat Edwin Edwards. Yes, that Edwin Edwards. The former governor and former prison inmate.

He once was the state’s governor and served also in Congress, representing the state’s Seventh District. Edwards also was, shall we say, one of the more colorful politicians ever to serve Louisiana, a state known for colorful pols. Huey Long might have written the book on political flamboyance, but ol’ Cajun Edwin wrote a chapter, maybe two, in that book.

Edwards wasn’t your run-of-the-mill character. He was proud of the trouble he kept finding. Edwards once said (reportedly) that the only way he’d ever lose an election was to be caught frolicking with a “dead girl or a live boy.” (Maybe it was the other way around, but you get the idea.) Another quote attributed to Edwards is that Louisianans “don’t expect their politicians to be crooked, they demand it of them.”

I had the pleasure of watching his 1991 campaign for Louisiana governor against Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, who was the Republican nominee that year. I attended a couple of political events in southwestern Louisiana back when I was working for the Beaumont Enterprise. Edwards crushed Duke that year in a landslide.

Seven years later, he was indicted and then convicted of several counts of racketeering, mail fraud, extortion and money laundering. He spent two years in a federal lockup in Fort Worth. Yeah, he’s a prince of a guy.

Well, he wanted back into public life. He’s 80-plus years old now, a bit past his prime, no doubt.

I was pulling for him to score an upset. If nothing else, the House of Representatives could use a little proverbial color in its ranks. Edwards would have provided it — and then some.

 

 

local news, State news

Self-proclaimed scribe passes from the scene

A friend from my former stomping grounds on the Texas Gulf Coast has given me some sad news.

Dr. Gary C. Baine has just died. OK, I’m sad mostly because of the loss his family has suffered. One of his in-laws is a friend of mine and I pray she finds comfort.

Gary Baine helped me hone my understanding of what one can refer to as “editor’s prerogative.” Baine was a fairly regular writer of letters to the editor of the paper where I worked for nearly 11 years. I edited the editorial page of the Beaumont Enterprise and part of my job was to manage the flow of letters that would appear on the pages of that paper.

And yes, Baine was one of our contributors.

He wasn’t just was any old, garden-variety, run-of-the-mill letter writer. Baine, a dentist in Beaumont, was very, very proud of the submissions he would send in.

How proud was he? I’ll tell you.

He was so proud that he would take me to task for having the utter gall to actually edit his letters. He thought his text was sacrosanct, not to be touched by another human’s hands. Why, how dare I actually do the job that my title implied — as an editor — and seek to sharpen his submissions, to correct them for grammar and occasionally for clarity?

That’s what I did for, oh, more than three decades. And by the time my path crossed with Baine’s, I’d been at it for a decade-plus. I thought I was pretty good at it making people’s letters read better than the original submissions. So I edited Baine’s submissions, using precisely the same techniques I would use on other letter writers’ manuscripts.

That didn’t suit Baine in the slightest. We would argue. I would seek to tell him about how the greatest writers in the nation are subject to editing by their editors. I tried to tell him that when reporters turn their stories over to editors, they in effect surrender ownership of their copy; it becomes the editor’s “property.”

The same policy holds true for those who submit unsolicited text to the newspaper. You turn it in, the editorial assumes responsibility for it and then can edit it — or not edit it. It’s the editor’s call exclusively.

None of those explanations ever quite passed Baine’s view of how the world should be run.

We had our differences, but we remained cordial — which I suppose might suggest that deep down he didn’t take himself as seriously as his reaction to my editing style indicated.

Dr. Baine did sharpen my understanding of my craft. For that, I am grateful beyond measure.

May he now rest in peace.

Uncategorized

This man's death really hurts

13 Comments

Maybe you’ve known someone like this individual.

Really smart. Lots of what’s called “institutional knowledge” of a community. Great word skills. A historian who could recite in minute detail the unfolding of significant events.

Add to that a heart that seemed bigger than his body.

That’s how I am attempting to describe a longtime friend and colleague who, I have just learned, died early today. His name was Julian Galiano.

I worked with Julian for several years at the Beaumont Enterprise way down yonder on the Gulf Coast of Texas. We struck up an almost-immediate friendship.

We were both of Mediterranean descent — he was Italian, I am Greek — and he picked up on that right away. He’d greet me with common Greek sayings. I’d respond with the tiny bit of Italian I know. We laughed a lot about large and trivial things.

I was struck almost immediately at how much he knew about Beaumont and the surrounding area. He was dedicated deeply to Lamar University, where he earned his degree. He could recite facts about people and events related to Lamar.

It dawned on me early on that I needed to rely on this guy as a source for local knowledge. I was new to the region. Julian knew that and always made himself available to this new guy — me — whenever I needed to fill in some blanks to understand the full context of a story.

Not long after I learned what a valuable source he was, it occurred to me that the newspaper that employed us both was underutilizing this guy’s talent. He was a sports copy editor, which he loved doing. I concluded that he needed to be the city editor of the newspaper, the newsroom’s chief line editor, the guy who made assignments to reporters, told them where to look for leads, gave them tips on who to call, what to ask, where to go.

I told Julian all of that. He laughed. He wanted no part of it. He was happy doing the job to which he was assigned, which was to make reporters’ raw copy more suitable for publication.

Fair enough.

Julian and I stayed in touch for many years through social media — and through occasional phone calls — after I left Beaumont for the Texas Panhandle. And almost without fail, he would ask about my family: How’s Kathy doing? And how about Peter and Nathan?

I’m grateful that we never lost contact.

Now he’s gone. What a huge loss for those who called him colleague and friend.

This one hurts. A lot.