Good evening, 919 Gang. I never
expected there would so soon be a news event that would wrest Page One away from
the coronavirus.
CARL LARSEN writes:
As I write this, it's nearly 7 p.m. on Sunday. It's unclear if San
Diego will endure another night of mindless looting and arson, leaving
mom-and-pop shops especially with another punch to the gut after the
coronavirus lockdown.
The last week has been a nightmare for our country --
starting with those nearly 9 minutes on video when George Floyd's life slowly
was extinguished by the brutality of a Minneapolis policeman as his colleagues
stood by. Since then, we've watched the resulting outrage travel from city to
city, first with peaceful demonstrations and then through the paroxysm of
looting and arson that left local authorities -- especially top politicians --
unable or unwilling to act decisively for days. The result of that inaction was
several more deaths.
Somehow, I felt, I had seen much of this before --
especially in 1968, which Smithsonian magazine called "The Year that
Shattered America." That title, I feel, has been handed now to our time.
As I scanned the local commercial TV channels Sunday, I was
amazed to watch the efforts exhibited by a cadre of broadcast reporters and
photographers, some of whom clearly had never been in front of a camera before
but who still offered compelling coverage. Earlier, I saw an American flag
being torched on a flagpole outside the La Mesa American Legion club, a video
taken by a U-T reporter who had put himself in harm's way.
Some of the channels didn't break away from regular
programming Sunday afternoon as quickly as I would have liked, but in my
limited survey, I gave them all high marks. This was an all-hands-on-deck
moment, and I wish that our city had a TV critic to go deeper into this to
bring up critical points of journalism -- as examples, whether to broadcast
unsubstantiated reports of looting and whether to tell viewers not to drive in
the impacted areas and whether to show by helicopter where police were staging.
But as I scanned the local TV offerings, I was left with
one overriding question about the prized 6 to 7 p.m. hour.
Where was KPBS-TV?
As a potential KPBS viewer at 6 p.m., here's what I was
given: "Change Your Brain, Heal Your Mind, with Daniel Amen, MD."
That was on the evening after "La Mesa's Night of
Hell," so aptly put by the Times of San Diego.
If your city is burning, isn't that the time for KPBS to
throw out the playbook, and bring in another voice to help our community
ascertain the depths of this problem?
I expected KPBS, of
all local stations, to give me context. What other local TV outlet would or could
devote the time for a lengthy interview with the mayors (of La Mesa and San
Diego, for example) or county supervisors? What about voices from the streets
-- the demonstrators -- something more than the sound bite "No Justice, No
Peace." And wasn't there matter of vital public interest that was totally
ignored -- the imposition of curfews in cities around the county. If that
message was not delivered, that is more than felony stupid.
Instead, what you get from the commercial stations is the
local "phoner" with Mayor Faulconer on the line for a minute and a
half. And what about airing interviews with those involved in the
demonstrations? What other station besides KPBS would interview (in studio or
remotely) local Human Relations Commission officers (yes, there are such
people). And who was willing to find out the answer of why local officials did
not call out the National Guard, as was done in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Diving deeper into KPBS programs, it was hard to find the
canned 6 to 7 p.m. KPBS program with Dr. Amen on its website. I was directed
from one directory to another. My experience, through my TV's scheduling guide,
is that a sizable amount of KPBS programming in prime and other times is not
known (or divulged) days in advance of broadcast. So if you want to watch
something besides Masterpiece, Nova or other of the PBS A-list programs, you
well are out of luck to find out what's playing a few days ahead.
It's important to know that my criticism here does not
extend to KPBS radio, or the KPBS website, which did have an updated story on
the San Diego situation Sunday evening.
Thousands of San Diegans support KPBS financially (I am not
a member), but I continually find the TV station's commitment to local public
affairs worse than anemic. Admittedly, there has been special coverage of the
coronavirus, but I think KPBS needs an on-air personality ("anchor"
if you will) to carry its flag with programs beyond a nightly newscast. Dare I
say it, but they need something akin to a good Larry King.
This is the one station I expect to go to for context --
for talking heads, if you will, giving us their viewpoints. The other stations
are great at on-the-scene coverage, and I don't expect KPBS to have its own
news chopper, or more than a dozen reporters on scene.
Instead what would
it have taken Sunday for an informative in-studio program wrapping up the day's
events, and some pointed questions and explanations from local officials as
well as interviews with those demonstrating on the streets?
We all are in need
of participating in a dialogue -- national and local -- to try to heal this
intractable virus of racial injustice. I was looking for KPBS, amid our civic
convulsion, to offer some light and focus on San Diego's role in this important
effort.
Sadly, they weren't at the table.
Other observations: When I awoke Sunday, I turned
first to the Times of San Diego site and found that my bank in La Mesa had been
burned to the ground and that my credit union branch, a descendant of the old
Copley Credit and First Future Credit Union, had been trashed. Destruction of a
Vons in the same complex led to an immediate "food desert" in La
Mesa.
The Times of San
Diego story was a good overview report, with that "night of hell"
headline that captured the events so perfectly, from the freeway shutdown, to
the afternoon demonstrations to the free-for-all of the night.
I then turned to the U-T Web site, which I infrequently
consult because it's so hard to navigate. They had, on Sunday morning, a good
story on the events of the previous night -- but it was listed as the seventh
story presented to viewers. Sometime, later in the day, the La Mesa story had
been moved to the top position.
If the U-T wants to wean readers from the dying newspaper
to its Web presence, then it needs to do a quick reboot of the Website.
You'll notice, watching the local network-news channels,
that they're all investing heavily in up-to-minute news apps with instant
notifications. Where are you on this, Jeff Light?
Finally, a name from the past was on a Times of San Diego
posting Sunday -- Chris Huard, who formerly was a Tribune City Desk assistant
back in my day before heading over to CNS. She provided the story for which I
looked first to KPBS -- a roundup of local officials' statements on the events
of the past 24 days.
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LUIS
MONTEAGUDO writes:
The most unusual summer job I had was
working at a male strip club.
No, I was not on stage (thank
goodness!)
I would come in after school and clean
up the place, which usually led to me finding discarded notes to the dancers,
women’s underwear and on one occasion, a glass tube with a white powder inside
it. Being the good Catholic boy I was, I turned it over to the owners.
I left the job after a couple of
months but it remains a great ice breaker story to tell.
CHUCK
BOYD writes:
I hesitate to go into details about my
early working years because my memory has large gaps.
No farming
jobs though, but it got sweaty delivering newspapers in the summer in South
Carolina.
I remember when a store opened in the
sixties in San Diego LIKE K-Mart, but it was not THAT national company. A press
release stated they had decided to open there because the area liked bargains.
It was up on Kearney Mesa, near USD, and that probably was when I worked there
while a student(??)... actually there in the camera section! I remember
explaining instant photos with a Polaroid camera! The end of darkrooms!
In high school in Charleston, I worked
at Norvell's Camera Exchange, on the corner, first floor, of the famed Francis
Marion Hotel. It was down the street from my high school so was an earlier
student work adventure.
 |
| Norvell's Camera Exchange |
I was a newspaper carrier (morning and
later, afternoon, when we had both) as was my older brother. Don't recall if
Dennis, the youngest, also embraced monetary journalism.
So, I was a school photographer in my senior
year and worked at a camera store, dispensing information and selling photo
equipment.
Sort of the launching period of a
life-long involvement in photography.
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TIFFANY
PORTER writes:
For Tom Arnold, Dave Hasemyer and
other veterans of the San Diego Log:
Yes, I’m a Log veteran too. I was Lou
Gerlinger’s first non-family-member employee after he bought the paper in 1975.
So Tom’s recollection about Lou having been a Secret Service agent had me
intrigued. I’d never heard his SS stories – only ones from his days as an arson
investigator. So I set off to do a bit of online digging. The first thing that
popped up was Lou’s recent obituary. He died last month at age 98.
I’m sure all Log veterans have their
share of stories about Lou Gerlinger. He was a true character and (despite
having no journalism background) an instinctive journalist -- extremely sharp,
inquisitive and never took anything at face value.
In 1975, The Log was printed at the
old San Dieguito Citizen in Solana Beach. One of my greatest learning
adventures in journalism was following Lou, the former arson investigator,
through the burned-out shell of the Citizen’s printing plant just hours after it
had been fire-bombed. Methodically working his way through the dark pressroom
lit only by glowing rolls of smoking newsprint, he explained in detail how the
fire had likely progressed as he led me to its point of origin. To this day, I
never smell the strangely sweet aroma of burning newsprint without thinking of
Lou Gerlinger.
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BRIAN CLARK writes:
Regarding David Farmer’s post on Irish
name pronunciations: Kirsten seems to have become a popular name for girls
these days. In this country, it is pronounced with a hard K at the start.
However, in Swedish, the K followed by an i is pronounced with as an SH, more
or less. I learned this bit of linguistic trivia while living in Sweden for a
year in college and studying at Uppsala University north of Stockholm. As for
the etymology of the name, it is the Scandinavian cognate of Christine, derived
from the Ecclesiastic Late Latin christiānus which is from the Ecclesiastic
Greek christianos (a Christian, a follower of Christ). Now you know. Last but
not least, I have an Irish great niece (now a terrible 2) whose name is Isla.
Anyone care to guess how her name is pronounced? I won’t tell you its
etymology, for that would give away its pronunciation.
P.O.
Box 2239
Ramona,
CA 92065-0938
United
States
