LIVE! FROM THE BASEMENT!

TV News ‘Home Studios’ in a Time of Pandemic

While I've been sheltering in place and napping in place, the Big TV News Stars have kept working through the Coronavirus Pandemic, setting up home studios and anchoring from their basements and dens and rumpus rooms. For me this has been the most fascinating part of the last few weeks of couch-sitting in place and watching TV in place.

I’ve always been interested in How Other People Live but these home studios have really offered a glimpse into the home lives of Big TV News Stars.

And yes, I am aware that they are aware these home studios are being broadcast and cablecast for all the world to see. So I’m sure that for many the backgrounds are carefully selected for maximum impressiveness.

I’m especially taken with the stars who chose backgrounds that included their personal bookcase.

That probably dates back to 1986 when I interviewed David Letterman in his New York office. The NBC publicist showed me in before Dave got back from his taping. So I took that time to investigate his bookshelf. Among the many volumes of forgotten lore was his high school yearbook. His high school yearbook!

It turned out to be the perfect icebreaker and for the first five minutes of the interview, Dave and I sat there and thumbed through his annual. He would stop every few pages to make a wisecrack about one of the pictures. “Seriously, nobody looked like that in 1965, did they?” he would say and snicker.

So if I were setting up a home studio, I’m sure, I would have a bookshelf background. In fact I’ve been thinking, if I were setting up a home studio which bookshelf would I sit in front of. I’d want to impress the audience with my literary bona fides. Maybe I would run out to Barnes & Noble and grab up a stack of Shakespeare plays. Oh, that’s right, B&N is closed. In the end I’m sure I’d make sure my background included a healthy stock of my own books, many of them covers out, not spines out.

Here is my collection of Big Stars’ Home Studio photos.

The most famous home studio belongs, or belonged, to the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie, and not just because she hosts a broadcast network show but also because she may have been the first to “anchor in place.” She got the sniffles early on and NBC sent her home to anchor from her basement – identified as being in upstate New York – with her husband as her camera operator/director. Her home studio is, or was (she moved back to the Rockefeller Center studio this morning) the least interesting of all I’ve seen, just a bland blue background. She noted on air that the door was duct taped shut to keep the kids out. I’ve never had a kid who couldn’t bust through a duct taped door. But that’s another story….\

Good Morning America's Robin Roberts chose what appears to be her living room, with fresh flowers, a few framed photographs and what may be some sort of collectible doll. Or a carnation. 

The primary focus in the home studio of CBS This Morning's Anthony Mason isn't Anthony Mason but some very striking painting. I majored in math so I can't identify the artist. 

What do Emmy winners do with their Emmys? CNN London correspondent Nic Robertson uses his as a bookend. 

CNBC's Sara Eisen has a really odd looking knick knack on the shelf behind her. Could that be the head of a parking meter? Perhaps she's a big fan of the opening scene of Cool Hand Luke, when a drunken Paul Newman is arrested for cutting the heads off parking meters. 

Eisen's CNBC colleague Wilford Frost, the 6'5" inch son of Sir David Frost, looks to me like he lives in the stateroom of a cruise ship that's docked next to another cruise ship. See the balcony across from his. My wife thinks it's a hotel suite or an apartment. 

Still at CNBC I'm trying to figure out that row of red books behind Andrew Ross Sorkin. They may have something to do with high finance and I'm more on the low finance side of economics. 

CBS News' Jericka Duncan has a wall hanging of inspirational phrases and a bookshelf of books whose titles I can almost read. 

Meg Tirrell of CNBC has a nice window overlooking something. 

I finally got around to posing for my own home studio photo. Make of it what you will....

The Year Kingsport Got Vaccinated Against Polio

Business was off at the State and the Strand. Things got so dismal that some days Legion Pool had no swimmers. It was 1953 in Kingsport and the specter of polio was taking its toll. Mothers were afraid to let their children play outside. Afternoon naps and daily baths were mandatory.\

Then on April 12, 1955 came the breath-taking news. “Salk Vaccine Announced Effective” was plastered across the top of the front page of the Kingsport Times.

“There is no doubt that children now can be vaccinated successfully to end the threat of polio and the anxiety it causes every year” the story began. You can’t know the joy that sentence brought to Kingsport mothers.

Sept. 15, 1948

Polio had terrorized the nation for half a century, striking down healthy children, crippling and paralyzing them. In his book about the discovery of the vaccine, “Breakthrough,” author Richard Carter describes the euphoria the vaccine announcement of April 12th brought. “People observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes.” Pittsburgh medical researcher Jonas Salk had solved the mystery of the disease.

Kingsport and Sullivan County began to move immediately. The next day the paper reported, “It is expected that the shots will begin sometime next week. Dr. J.W. Erwin, county health department director, has urged parents of first, second, third and fourth graders who have received parental request cards to return them to their children’s teachers this week.”

A polio vaccine had only been announced and already Kingsport’s health community was mobilizing to inoculate local kids.

The Thursday April 14th Times reported that the Salk vaccine was en route to Kingsport and that Dr. Erwin had scheduled free inoculations in area elementary schools beginning Monday April 18 at 9 a.m. and continuing until every grade school student under age 11 was inoculated.

Shots were slated for Lynn Garden, Washington, and Lincoln Elementary schools the first day; Bell Ridge, Jackson, Long Island, Johnson and Dickson on Tuesday; Fort Robinson, Douglass, Sullivan and Orebank on Wednesday; Central Heights on Thursday; and Gravely, Cedar Grove, West View and Kingsley on Friday. Local doctors would administer the shots with help from public health nurses. The paper even listed mothers who had volunteered to help in the massive effort.

The Times reported that the first shot on April 18 was administered at Washington school to Debbie Salyer. The paper noted there were “very few cry babies…and only a few cases of ‘scared sick’ first graders.”

I don’t know who the Times reporter was - there was no by-line - but that certainly wasn’t the case at Johnson on the second day. I was one of the 288 kids who got shots that day and I can tell you that every single one of us was scared sick.

Betsy Taylor Bales remembers, “I got sick in anticipation, standing in the line going into the gym where they were giving the shots and I was taken to the office. Somehow, they lost track of me and I remember someone asking me if I had the shot yet and I lied and said ‘yes,’ so I never got it.  I did take the oral vaccine later when it was served on sugar cubes. I believe this is the first time I've confessed to this.”

We were lined up in the front hallway, a trail of frightened kids, all pointed toward the gym, where Martha Snyder remembers there were a number of “nurses in starched, white dresses with starched, white caps and white lace up heels - most impressive.”

Jane Hultin was one of the public health nurses. She worked Washington School the first day, moved to Jackson on Tuesday, to Douglass on Wednesday and finished up the week at West View. Hultin remembers the mass inoculation well because “I only worked as a nurse for three or four years, until I stayed home to raise my daughter.”

Because everything happened so quickly, less than a week from announcement to inoculation, there was a shortage of equipment. Hultin says, “This was in the days before throwaway needles so we had to sterilize ours. I had a Revere Copperware pot and a friend at Eastman made a little holder for the needles.”

Hultin says she saw a lot of kids with big eyes but didn’t experience any problems. One reason for that, according to Snyder, may be the arrangement. “I don't think they let us all in to see others being shot. I think they let just a few in at a time to reduce the fear factor.”

When you are seven years old, which is what I was at the time, a needle looks a foot long and a half-inch thick. I remember standing in line, biting my lip. The only noise in the hallway was deep breathing. Then suddenly up ahead a kid burst into tears at the thought of getting a shot and all the kids around him started crying in sympathy. A gaggle of teachers raced over to calm the group. They no sooner had this group soothed than another kid in the back of the line started crying and the teachers raced back there. The teachers were running around like those jugglers on “Ed Sullivan” trying to keep plates spinning.

After the shots kids walked zombie-like back to class, a lollipop in hand.

One of the doctors that day, Dr. Jay Warren, had been a division commander at Normandy. He had seen action. But not like this. Dr. Lyle Smith, who was another of the doctors, recalls, “At the end of the day he told me, ‘I am so sore. One seven-year-old kid kicked me all over.’”

The newspaper noted that 1,117 kids were inoculated the first day of vaccinations; another 1,232 received shots the second day. By Friday 3,938 Kingsport area kids had been vaccinated against polio.

The polio vaccine was a medical miracle. In 1954, the year before the mass Salk vaccine inoculations, there were 38,476 new cases of polio in this country. In 1964 there were 121 new cases nationwide. In 1974 there were seven new cases. The last naturally occurring case of polio in this country occurred in 1979.

XXX

We should tip our cap to the mothers and volunteers who mobilized Kingsport’s fight against polio a half century ago. Here’s who worked where during that hectic week:

Nurse Alma Godsey was in charge at Lynn Garden Elementary, with help from mothers Mrs. Willard Pardue, Mrs. James Rosser and Mrs. Emily Brown.

Nurse Jane Hultin headed the Washington school effort with volunteers Mrs. C.C. Roberts, Mrs. T.B. Yancey and Mrs. Merritt Shobe. 

Two nurses, Faye Cain and Mrs. Melvin Martin, were in charge at Lincoln, with help from volunteers Mrs. W.A. Tyler, Mrs. William Harrison, Mrs. Raymond Steadman and Mrs. Henry Burem.

Nurse Godsey went to Bell Ridge on Tuesday where she was assisted by Alma Glass and Mrs. James Dennis.

Hultin was nurse in charge at Jackson on Tuesday, assisted by Mrs. Tom Murrell, Mrs. Barbara Holmes and Mrs. R.W. Ingraham.

At Long Island nurse Miniclair Duncan got help from volunteers Flora Eidson and Mrs. Joe Pylant.

Our nurses at Johnson were Mrs. Cain and Mrs. Martin with parent volunteers Mrs. Trula Thomas, Mrs. W.W. Allerton and Mrs. W.P. McGuire.

The nurse in charge at Dickson was Mrs. Vera Gillespie with help from volunteers Mrs. Betty Penland, Mrs. Mildred Fletcher and Mrs. Marie Walkey.

On Wednesday nurse Godsey moved to Fort Robinson where she was helped by Mrs. Mabel Asbury and Mrs. W.W. Bailey.

The nurse at Douglas was Mrs. Hultin, with help from Mrs. C.C. Roberts.

Nurse Duncan was in charge at Sullivan with help from volunteers Mrs. Robert Banner, Mrs. Anna L. Erwin and Mrs. Violet Ring.

Nurse Gillespie ran the Orebank clinic with help from Mrs. Ethel Jessee and Zola Stump.

Thursday was a light day with only Central Heights students receiving shots. Nurse Gillespie received help from Mrs. James Asbury and Mrs. Ed Shaulis.

Five schools wound up the week with Friday vaccinations. Nurse Godsey with help from Mrs. Raymond Hutchinson covered Gravely. Godsey then moved to Cedar Grove where she was aided by Ann Davis and Doris Edwards. West View had nurse Hultin and volunteer Edythe Mann. Miller-Perry shots were overseen by nurse Duncan and volunteers Katherine Pomeroy and Mary Tanner. Kingsley school had nurse Gillespie and parents Mrs. Neil Faris, Mrs. Robert Phipps and Mrs. Jean Brown.

XXX

A small group of Sullivan county students had volunteered to be polio pioneers, part of a group of 400,000 children nationwide who tested the Salk vaccine in 1954. Some 1,532 second graders in the county received the vaccine on April 27, 1954 with booster shots four weeks and five weeks later. Shelby County was also a field test site in 1954, the only two Tennessee counties to test the Salk vaccine.

My Mother's Birthday

 Mother and me - 1951

My mother was born on March 10, 1920, one hundred years ago today. But we won't be celebrating. She died in 2004 at age 84. 
She was born in a farmhouse in the Splatter Creek Community of Greene County to a farmer and his wife. She was the 9th of 13 children and the first to be born with the help of a midwife. She was also the first in her family to graduate from high school. She was salutatorian. She told me at the end of her life that she would have been valedictorian if she hadn't done the French homework for person who finished above her in class rank. That person was her nephew, son of a sister who was 19 years her senior. She would have been the first in her family to graduate college. She was offered a full scholarship to Tusculum College. But she had something else in mind. "I wanted to get married." She and my father married a week after her high school graduation, slipping away from Decoration Day at the local cemetery and getting married in the living room of the First Baptist Church of Kingsport's manse. . 
I was living with her, taking care of her, when she died 16 years ago. I wrote this column as my own little tribute:

I’ve been writing my mother’s obituary for the last two years, since that summer day in 2002 when my aunt Nola called me in Louisville to tell me that mother was at her house in Greeneville.

My mother had been wandering her own home for the previous few days, disoriented, leaving the phone off the hook, getting her medicine and its dosages mixed up. She was in bad shape and her friends had intervened, transporting her to her sister’s until I could arrive.

I got there as quickly as I could and I found my mother, as strong a person as I have ever known, quivering. I knew what I had to do: I would have to take over her care. She had been living alone, a widow, for 16 years. But she would no longer be able to do that. She couldn’t remember phone numbers; she lost track of her medicine; and she couldn’t handle cooking her meals.

That night I lay awake composing my mother’s obituary, that’s how different she was from the woman I had visited only a month earlier.

For the first time in my life I saw my mother’s mortality. The woman who had spoon-fed me, dressed me, sent me off to school, met me at the bus stop, now had trouble dressing herself.

I knew that soon - I didn’t know how soon, I didn’t want to think about how soon - I would have to write her obituary.

I struggled to think what I wanted the world to know about her.

That she had the biggest heart and the gentlest nature of any person I had ever known.

That while she sometimes couldn’t open a jar of jelly she was so strong that she endured almost constant pain from broken vertebrae, bones crushed by osteoporosis.

That she kept a stack of coconut cakes in the freezer awaiting the call that someone was sick or someone had died.

I started and restarted her obituary countless times that fitful night.

But I could never find the words.

At daybreak I knew I couldn’t write her obituary because I couldn’t stand the thought that my mother might die.

I moved back to Kingsport to care for her, to phone her friends, to wash her clothes, to cook her meals - that last one a joke. My mother, the most wonderful cook in the world, never taught me to cook. She preferred to do it for me and I was content to lick spatulas instead of stirring them.

But her appetite and her tastes had so narrowed that she raved about my grilled cheese sandwiches - two slices bread plus one slice processed cheese in toaster oven. She bragged to her friends what a wonderful cook I was.

I should have recognized then that her mind was slipping.

I’ve started her obituary over a hundred times in the two years that I’ve been back in Kingsport.

Must mention her desserts. Especially cream puffs. Don’t forget her French fries. Her years of rising before dawn to bake wedding cakes and prepare country ham biscuits for wedding planners Mildred Faris and Gladys Porterfield. Her love of clothes and fashion and Dean Martin’s crooning. How, after I went away to college, she adopted Theresa Bellamy and Michelle Free as the daughters she never had.

But I was never able to find the time to tap out a few thoughts into the computer. I knew it wasn’t because I didn’t have the time; it was because I didn’t want to write my mother’s obituary.

But now I have to.

My mother died Saturday morning at Indian Path Hospital, two weeks after suffering a stroke. It was peaceful and painless and all the things we all hope for in our own deaths. Her last breath was as gentle as her life.

And now I’m searching for the words and phrases to explain a lifetime of love, of unselfish, undemanding devotion.

And I can’t find any. I’ve been a professional writer since I was 21 years old but I can’t find the words to explain the greatest tragedy of anyone’s life, the loss of a mother.

There are no words.

The 1918 Spanish Flu Had a Silver Lining for Kingsport: the Creation of a Hospital

It’s called the 1918 flu but it lasted well into 1920. That early twentieth century pandemic – also called the Spanish flu - may have killed as many as 50 million people worldwide and infected 500 million, one third of the world’s population at the time.

In 1918 Kingsport may have been small – the population didn’t top 5,000 until 1920 - and remote but it was still affected by the Spanish flu.

In fact something good came out of the pandemic: Kingsport’s hospital.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Kingsport had no need of a hospital. It didn’t have that many people.

The 1910 census listed Kingsport’s population as 250.

On January 1, 1915 it was estimated there were 900 people living in the city.

Then came incorporation and industrialization and the city’s population boomed. The 1920 census said it was 5,692. Two months later a health department survey reported 7,000 living in the city. And that number didn’t include what the newspaper called “Kingsport’s most flourishing suburbs.” Old Kingsport had a thousand residents. Another 500 were living in West View Park. Even Highland Park, which was just being built, already had 300 people. Add in Gibsontown (200) and a few other suburbs and the newspaper said the town probably had 10,000 residents. From 250 to 10,000 in ten years. The city was behind on a lot of public service facilities.

But not a hospital. The flu insured that.

We don’t know exactly how hard Kingsport was hit by the first wave of the Spanish flu because the newspaper records for 1918 no longer exist.

But from a Nov. 14, 1919 story we learn that “Kingsport's Community Hospital…was founded by the city Oct. 11, 1918, to provide greater facilities for checking influenza here. …The Board of Mayor and Aldermen established the Community Hospital after citizens assembled in a mass-meeting petitioned that body to provide means for the treatment of persons suffering from influenza. The hospital for several months after its establishment was filled with ‘flu’ patients, nearly all of whom, it is thought, owe their lives to the treatment received therein.”

(There had been a small hospital at 121 East Charlemont run by Dr. Yopp but it couldn’t handle the large number of flu cases.)

That eight-bed facility, which was run by the city, was located on the second floor of the Hicks Building on the corner of Broad and Market (the building is still there; it’s directly across Broad from the State Theater).

The city ran it for a year and then sold it to Drs. Edwards and Tipton for $1,800 with the agreement that they would accept charity cases. The city had been operating the facility at a loss of about $300 a month. (A month later it was sold again to a group of 9 doctors that included Dr. Tipton.)

We know from newspaper reports that the flu was still raging after that Nov. 1919 sale of the hospital.

Every issue of the paper had more cases to report.

T.R. Bandy came down with the flu Oct. 14, 1919. Three weeks later “Mrs. Jake Shoun has been confined to her home on Wanola with influenza.”

The paper reported the city had suffered 155 cases of influenza during February 1920.

Soon the flu report read like a who’s who of Kingsport:

Mrs. Jimmy Hamlett, Mrs. Glenn Bruce and “little son,” “Marshall Doggett, who has been ill with influenza, is convalescent at the home of his uncle J. Fred Johnson,” William Roller Jr., Mrs. Ben Dobyns and “little daughter.”

It attacked entire families. The March 7, 1920 report from Kendricks Creek noted that Joe Dragg and his son had died of influenza.

March 8, 1920: Bloomingdale. “Influenza is sweeping this section. School has been suspended until the epidemic has subsided.”

That same day: “Mrs. Annie May Lampkin died at her home on Holston Heights after an illness of six days….William Smith, 16, of Indian Springs died after his influenza developed into pneumonia.”

It continued into April. But the last flu report in the paper was April 23, Mrs. W.W. Hufford.

And then it was over.

The epidemic had passed.

I can’t find a summary of deaths in Kingsport but it must have been in the hundreds.

There were some success stories. On March 5, 1920 little Robert Pyle Jr. was gravely ill, his influenza having progressed into pneumonia and then spinal meningitis, according to the newspaper. “Although four physicians are in attendance, no hope is entertained of his recovery.”

But recover he did and he was able to write Santa a letter in December asking for “a kiddekar, a ball, a toy horse, and some bedroom slippers and a bathrobe.”