Is having a photo in the paper still a big deal?

In June 1977, I was starting pitcher for the Windham (N.H.) Babe Ruth All-Star team in a regional tournament game against the town next door, Salem. It was (ahem) a solidly pitched ballgame on both sides, but Salem won with a late-inning rally. I was 13 then – and crushed.

But a few days later, my parents opened the weekly newspaper that covered my town. There, on the front of the sports section, was a centerpiece photo of Peter St. Onge, Windham pitcher. The picture caught me mid-pitch and in full, early-teen awkwardness, complete with braces and bottle-thick brown glasses.

“It was a great picture,” remembers my mother, who is contractually obligated to reach that conclusion.

It was also a big deal. My parents bought extra copies and dutifully sent them to family. One copy was folded and placed among our boxes of family keepsakes. All of which is what you do when your picture is in the paper.

Today, the Observer celebrates its 125th birthday with a special commemorative section. You’ll read about our history – good and bad – and about the people who’ve led and written in and delivered the O. One story, which I had the privilege of writing, is about readers who’ve had their photos in our newspaper and saved them 30, 50, even 80 years.

An Observer photo, some told me, was an important moment in their lives.

Is it still? Is having your picture in the paper a big deal today, wherever that paper may be?

I asked friends this week, most of them non-journalists, and most say yes. But, said one, it’s different now. Quainter.

Part of that is technology. If young Peter pitches in an All-Star game today, family and friends can read about it on Facebook, see his photos on Flickr, maybe even watch a video of highlights in Dropbox. We’re our own publishers and photographers now, and for better or worse, having our lives available for public consumption just isn’t as unusual.

A bigger part of the change, maybe, is societal. Talk to those older readers who had their photos in the Observer, and they’ll tell you it wasn’t only the picture that was a big deal – it was who took that photo and told their story. The newspaper was a pillar of the community – an institution. But we’ve come to view our institutions more skeptically now.

Lots of folks point to the Watergate burglary and its political aftermath as the time when society began to tilt toward cynicism. Not only did Woodward & Bernstein give Americans reason to lose confidence in government officials, they ushered in an era of journalism where all the pillars – doctors and bankers and elected leaders – were fair game for suspicion.

And newspapers? Used to be we were content to have a mostly one-sided relationship with you. We’d bring you the news, and we’d tell you stories about you, but we did it all from our spot on the hill with the other community leaders. Now we invite you to help us learn what’s happening, and we give you more places to say what you think about our decisions and our flaws. And boy, do you.

But there also are days when an issue roils our city, or Osama bin Laden is killed, and we’re reminded how many of you turn to us – more than ever in print and online. And still, I get calls from people asking if I can grab extra copies of their story, their photo in the paper.

Is it still a big deal, that photo? You’re surely expecting the newspaper guy to say “yes.”

Let’s say this: It’s a different deal, for sure. We’re more fragmented now, technologically and ideologically. We trust each other less. But in a community, a newspaper is still one of the few places where you’ll find not only your 13-year-old ballplayer, but your neighbors’. It’s where our individual big deals are still brought together, still shared, each day, 125 years later.

Do's and don'ts in the land of the Free

In Tim Newman's world, you can put away that wallet. The tickets are comped and the drinks are free. Somebody always picks up the check.

It’s a world of corporate tents and arena suites, a world some of us get to see sometimes, if a friend of a friend shoots us an invite. But it’s fun when it happens, because who doesn’t like getting stuff for nothing?

Free is the fuel that revs the hospitality world. It’s what clients expect in the tents at big events. It’s what event organizers expect from the cities that woo them. And it’s where Newman, head of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, excels.

Newman is tasked with bringing visitors and events to the arenas and convention centers the CRVA runs. And while some might debate how much our city wants or needs showpieces like the NASCAR Hall of Fame or 2012 Democratic National Convention, this much is true: Newman gets Charlotte things that other cities want.

He does it, in part, because he knows the power of Free. Take a peek at the CRVA’s expenses, and you’ll see some fine wooing – concert tickets and lavish parties for people who might help steer something to Charlotte someday.

It’s a necessary but sometimes unseemly endeavor, which is why some cities set up their CVRAs as private nonprofits, which have looser rules and harder-to-find financial statements. In Charlotte, however, the CVRA is public, and right now it’s a public mess.

The Observer, in recent weeks, has told you about some ethical iffiness at the tax-supported CRVA, including most recently how Newman has graced dozens of Charlotte business leaders, public employees and CRVA board members with gifts. Among the eyebrow raisers: $4,600 worth of tickets to see the New York Yankees.

Newman defends those gifts, saying they help people in Charlotte get enthused about Charlotte, and that’s good for everyone.

That’s the problem with Free – it’s easy to rationalize. Sure, it’s Public Employee 101 that you don’t take gifts from people who want to influence your decisions. But what if those freebies are coming from the chief of a public body, who just wants to say attaboy?

And if you’re a CRVA board member, what’s the harm in using the CRVA suite for a Bobcats game or concert? Board member Anthony Lindsey did so out of duty. He told the Observer he wanted to see how the arena worked, and he did some thorough investigating, using 44 tickets in two years.

Now, board members have concluded it might be a good idea to look at exactly how things work at the operation they oversee. They’ve hired a consultant – PricewaterhouseCoopers – for $25,000 plus expenses to report on how CRVA compares with everybody else operating out there in the Wild West of hospitality.

“We’ve got to know what the rules are,” said board member Geoff Durboraw on Wednesday, at a CRVA operations committee meeting. “We can’t come to you and tell you that you broke a rule if we don’t know what it is.”

Might that be something the board would want to know, say, back in 2004, when the CRVA was formed?

The board will provide PricewaterhouseCoopers with everything from financial statements and code of ethics to the employee newsletter. PricewaterhouseCoopers will get back to the board in mid-June, a remarkable turnaround for a critical report, which might make you wonder if this is one more check that shouldn’t have been written.

Because the CRVA already should know what it shouldn’t be doing.

You don’t offer public officials and employees gifts for doing something that’s part of their job.

You don’t allow board members to accept freebies from the people they need to supervise and, perhaps, discipline.

What you do is remove the temptation of Free. Because in Tim Newman’s world, someone actually is picking up the check.

That somebody is us.

With verdict, a mother gets her daughter back

Johnnie Mae could sing. Lord, she could sing. Gospel or blues or whatever came into her head and crossed those lips. “Didn’t matter what it was,” says her mother.

In fact, Edna Shine says proudly, a teacher once told her that music and Johnnie Mae always went together beautifully.

Then, with a small smile only a mother is allowed, she adds: “But she didn’t believe in doing much homework.”

Edna got her daughter back this past week. After 10 years of waiting for police to find and arrest
Johnnie Mae’s killer. After one year of waiting for a murder trial, then one week of having to relive Johnnie Mae’s addiction and stabbing. Finally, on Wednesday, Tyrone Johnson was convicted in Charlotte and sent to prison for life.

And all of it ended the week leading up to Mother’s Day.

Johnnie Mae “Coochie” Shine was the first of seven girls Edna raised in Charlotte. She gave each the same foundation, took them all to church every Sunday. But like any parent, she came to know that they may be our children, but they become their own people, often so different than each other – and us. “You just never know why,” Edna says.

Coochie was different, for sure. Edna knew it from the time she looked over and saw her 6-month-old dancing to the music in the room. Even when six other sisters filled the house, it was Coochie who stood out. “She was the oldest, the smallest, the shortest,” Edna says. “Everything you say about Coochie, you just put an ‘est’ on it, and that’s about right.”

It was in her 20s that Coochie started to get high. She would go on binges and stop eating, and her family would pray. She would come out of it, start eating again, and give her family hope. And always, she lit up a room, still singing and dancing, still generous and impulsive. “God protects the fools and babies,” she liked to say.

Early in the morning of May 29, 2000, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police found the body of Johnnie Mae Shine, 40, near her Plaza Midwood home. Police immediately had a suspect in Johnson, but it wasn’t until years later that the department’s cold case unit was able to link him to the murder through DNA obtained from a 2006 arrest in South Carolina. Last May, they made an arrest.

At the trial, Johnson described the same Johnnie Mae Edna knew – the one who made everyone laugh. But he also described them smoking crack together, and prosecutors told the jury that he chased her to a neighbor’s porch and stabbed her 10 times. “They showed that tiny body with all them holes in it,” Edna says, and she covers her mouth and turns her head from the thought of it.

Edna decided not to go to the final day of the trial Wednesday, but shortly before noon, her daughter Clarissa called and said, “Mama, we got him.” Then Shirley called, then all the others, and everybody got to crying.

Edna Shine did, too, because now Coochie could rest. She cried because she loved Coochie like all of her daughters, six of them with good lives and families. That’s what mothers do, which made Edna cry for one more person.

“I felt sad for his mama,” she says of Tyrone Johnson.

“It’s her child. And you love your children.”

A bell finally rings for death - and life

A dozen years ago, Ken and Estela Ross found a bell at a flea market while vacationing near Washington, D.C.

Actually, it was Ken who found the bell, which was iron and about a foot tall. Estela wasn’t so sure about it. But her husband had long wanted to hang one from their west Charlotte house, so home the bell came, where it sat in storage until Sept. 11, 2001.

After the World Trade Center buildings fell, Ken found the bell and painted it red, white and blue. He fabricated a bracket and hung the bell on the back left corner of their house. Ken wasn’t an overtly patriotic man, but the country swelled with such sentiment then, and Ken told Estela that they wouldn’t ring the bell until Osama bin Laden had been captured.

And so the bell had been silent when Ken died of organ failure in 2003.

Last Sunday evening, Estela went to bed before President Barack Obama told a nationwide television audience that U.S. special operations forces had killed bin Laden in Pakistan. She is remarried now, and her husband, Ralph Breckle, woke up Monday and went out front to get the paper. He told Estela the news.

The bell, she thought.

Ralph had thought of it, too, so he went outside and oiled the joints, then attached a rope to the handle and gave it a test tug. At first, it didn’t want to move, but as he worked with it, the bell remembered what it was here for, and Ralph was ready.

There’s been some discussion this week about how we should acknowledge the death of Osama. We’ve celebrated, both publicly and privately, then wondered if a few of those celebrations were too much. Some have talked about finding closure by seeing photos of the dead terrorist, and some have recoiled at the thought of needing that.

What should you do when you’ve killed your greatest enemy?

Maybe this is about right:

About 2:30 on Monday afternoon, Estela came outside, and Ralph took a picture of the bell – and Estela with it. He said a prayer for all the souls that were set free when the Twin Towers fell.
He asked that we might be able to put aside the past and begin a new era of peace and understanding. He rang the bell.

Estela cried – for those souls and the one she misses. Then she told Ralph his prayer was good, and she got ready to go to work.

After tragedy, a message in the music

By 7 p.m., the choir is robed, and Jimmy Jones goes over some last-moment details. Always, there are details – who will sit where, when their voices will rise in unison, when harmony will deliver their message.

In 30 minutes, they will be performing John Rutter’s Requiem, one of eight Holy Week services through Easter Sunday at Myers Park United Methodist Church. “This is a mass for the dead,” says Jones, the church’s director of music. “It’s kind of a singing someone to heaven.”

It’s something he doesn’t often reflect on during the bustle of his busiest week. But now, yes.

Last Saturday afternoon, as Jones was driving back from Winston-Salem, his phone began ringing with calls from Lee County, where he was born and raised. It’s where his family still lives – parents and sister, aunts and uncles and cousins, all within a mile or two of each other in an unincorporated farming community southeast of Raleigh.

Some of them had watched minutes before as a tornado destroyed his sister Susie’s house and a cousin’s home next door. Susie and her family thankfully weren’t home, but his cousin, Mike Hunter, was pulled from his house and dropped in the woods nearby. He was 42 years old, a lover of the outdoors, and now, one of 22 fatalities from Saturday’s storms.

“They’re still in shock,” Jones says. “We’ve never had a tragedy like this.”

He drove back home, of course, to the community that’s about half the size of his congregation here. It was where his mom would take him to choir practice, where he fell in love with sacred music and the organ that made it. He was the baby of the family, a prodigy on the electronic organ his parents eventually bought for their basement.

Now, they picked through the rubble of his sister’s house. They cut up fallen trees in the yards. They mourned.

“Hold that note,” he says Thursday, back in Charlotte with his choir. The church is filling. The choir is rehearsing, one more time, pieces of the requiem to come.

Jones, who is 28, came back Wednesday night, after his cousin’s wake, to prepare for all the services this week. In a way, he says, it’s been good to busy himself with the usual worries about tempo and timing.

But this year, he also has noticed the requiem’s plaintive cello – “an anguished kind of sound,” he says. The voices and the songs are a warm hand on his shoulder. “I hear it and I conduct it differently,” he says.

And the message? He remembered this week a sermon at his last church, in Greensboro, where his pastor talked about the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” We don’t just walk into that valley, the pastor told him. “There is another side,” Jones says.

In moments, his 45-member choir will sing those words in the requiem. And no, the music doesn’t provide the answers to his questions – why this tragedy happened, how God allows you to mourn a cousin but be thankful about a sister. But it is a reminder this holy week of what he does believe. “A strengthening,” he says.

And this is what he tells his choir. “A requiem,” he reminds them, “is a Mass for the dead. It’s not happy. But in the end, there is hope.” Then he leads them to the sanctuary, and he leads them in song, blending in harmony and rising in unison. Grant them rest eternal, Lord our God, we pray to thee.

After tornado comes roar of attention

In each of Lowe’s 1,725 home improvement stores, managers and staff are trained for catastrophes. During hurricanes, for example, managers complete preparedness checklists that include items such as boarding up store windows.

For tornadoes, that checklist can be boiled down to this: Get everyone in the store to a safe place, pronto.

Three days after accomplishing just that, Mike Hollowell is a little stunned at the celebrity that comes with doing what you’re supposed to do.

Hollowell is manager of the Lowe’s in Sanford destroyed Saturday by a tornado that was among several storms claiming 22 lives in North Carolina. None of the deaths was at the Sanford Lowe’s, however, and Hollowell has since received hugs and thank-yous from customers and co-workers, along with dozens of interview requests and one phone call, Monday afternoon, from the president of the United States.

“Man,” he said Tuesday, “it’s been amazing.”

On Tuesday afternoon, while Lowe’s honored the Sanford staff by announcing a $250,000 donation to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, Hollowell tended to his own relief efforts. He, along with Lowe’s officials, transferred each Sanford employee to one of four nearby stores, and employees also were offered trauma counseling.

He’s relived the tornado hundreds of times, he says, especially in the immediate hours following, when rescue workers combed the piles of metal and broken glass that were once his store. “I thought we got everyone to a safe place,” he said. “But there were one or two that I wondered, ‘Did they listen to me and go?’ ”

Hours before, it was a normal Saturday, with the lighter crowd of do-it-yourselfers that comes with a rainy forecast. Near 3 p.m., about 10 minutes before the tornado struck, an employee told him of a tornado warning in Lee County, home of Sanford, about 40 miles southwest of Raleigh. Minutes later, he saw employees and customers running.

“I looked over and there it was,” he said. “It was so massive; it didn’t look like a tornado.”

He and other managers immediately began herding 100 or so customers and staffers to a safe room with no windows, while another manager got on the microphone to do the same. When Hollowell finally made his way toward the room, he looked back and saw the store’s roof peeling off.

Now, he tells everyone the same thing: It wasn’t just he who saved people. It was the staff. Of course, the public likes a face on its heroism, so the 30-year-old Hollowell has stood before cameras and notebooks and taken phone calls, including one Monday on his cell that showed up as “Unknown.”

When he answered, he was asked to hold, which he did until a woman picked up and said, “This is the secretary of the president of the United States.”

“Um,” Mike Hollowell replied, “this is Mike Hollowell.”

Moments later, Barack Obama said “Hello, Michael,” then thanked him for Saturday.

“Unbelievable,” said Hollowell by phone Tuesday, but he wonders, still humbly, why everyone is making a big deal about doing what his training told him to do. In a way, though, he understands. He has since watched a YouTube video at the store taken after the tornado hit. The video showed his staff helping customers out of the building.

Single file, Hollowell notes proudly. At their best in the worst kind of moment.

The price we pay for our mistakes

Caleb Allen seems like a decent guy, a polite and well-spoken guy, sitting on his mother’s couch in a middle-class Huntersville neighbhorhood. But heroin, we know, takes the decent kids, too.

It first grabbed Caleb four years ago. He went from casual user to heavy user to jail, where he rediscovered God and has started the slow path to a clean life. It could be a moving story, if you believe in it.

You may have read about Caleb, 25, and his mother Diana. Caleb was arrested in February in a south Charlotte break-in, and Diana didn’t believe it. She called people from records she’d kept when her son was using drugs. When one man gave her a tip, she staked out and chased a red Jeep like the one police say was the getaway car in that crime and several others.

The duo she led police to have been arrested in South Carolina. Charges against her son have been dropped.

The response to the story fell into two camps. The police screwed up, some said, enthusiastically. Others noted that Caleb Allen contributed to his mess. “We’re not talking about a saint,” said one commenter.

Allen has read those comments.

“I’m definitely not a saint,” he says.

This is what he is: An addict. It began, he says, after high school. He had moved from South Carolina to Charlotte, where he’d lived most of his life. He worked the club scene, where temptations were plenty and he was willing. Alcohol and pot turned into ecstasy and prescription pills. Then one day, a friend of a friend introduced him to heroin.

“For a while, it was a once-a-month thing,” he says, but heroin was a hot, available drug in Charlotte. Allen began to use it every weekend, then every other day. He was busted for possession after a traffic stop, but that didn’t slow him down.

Then last November, he was charged for something worse: possessing and selling heroin. The reality, he says, is less sinister – in the addicts’ world, you get someone this if he can get you that. But the charges were real, and he found himself in Mecklenburg County jail. “I kind of just gave up,” he says.

Eventually, he traded his food tray to a fellow inmate, who had some books to read. Allen got “A Purpose Driven Life,” the spiritual bestseller by Rick Warren. Caleb had grown up a church-goer, a believer, and reading the book brought him an overwhelming peace. “I’ve never felt anything like that before,” he says.

The feeling stayed with him. He started going to church again, he says, and he showed up for the counseling and drug tests set up by Mecklenburg’s Drug Court program. He says he’s been clean since August, and he’s thought that once he’s ready, he could use his story to help others avoid his mistakes. “I told him, Caleb, this can be your gift,’” says his mother.

But on Feb. 16, police came to his house, cuffed him and took him downtown. His mug made it to the TV news. He was booted immediately from Drug Court.

He’s not sure why police paid little heed to his mother’s calls. Maybe they already had a drug addict with a red Jeep and thought A plus B equals C. But CMPD, coming off high-profile detective errors in a police shooting case last year, can and should be better.

No apologies have come, Allen says. In fact, the opposite – papers dismissing the charges say that police said they couldn’t prove that Allen wasn’t involved with the pair eventually arrested – but that they couldn’t prove he wasn’t.

But Caleb Allen isn’t bitter. Even some family members are skeptical, he says, and he understands. This is another struggle of the road he’s just beginning. The price you pay isn’t just time served, but that for a long while, people will assume the worst of you.

“I don’t have any credibility right now,” he says, on a Friday in Huntersville. Right now, what he has is the next clean day, and God willing, the next.