Pandemic Potpourri

 Famous in the future…

This page from the 1940 edition of the D-B yearbook has three future famous folks. Can you identify them?

 

Bobby Cifers was already famous. He lead the nation in scoring as a junior on D-B’s football team and was featured in a wire story that was carried by newspapers around the country. He would star in football at UT and later play in the NFL for the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.

Margaret Deck would become a legend as a Bible teacher in the Kingsport city school system, a position she held for 30 years. Her most famous exclamation, and the closest she came to profanity, was “Merciful Fathers!”

Rita Groseclose, who came from one of Kingsport’s pioneering families – the family farm is at the intersection of Stone Drive and Bloomingdale Pike - would go on to teach girls phys. ed. at D-B for almost one hundred years.

 

Tales of the pandemic

We were visiting the kids and grandkids back in the summer and I was babysitting five-year-old Sammy. After a few awkward minutes, he looked at me and asked, “When do you think you’ll pass away?”

Honest, he really asked me that.

(I headed to the computer, surfed to the Social Security Life Expectancy Chart and told him, “2033.”)

 

Boring headline….

I first heard about it in 1980 from Louisville radio legend Bob Moody, a voracious reader, especially of minutiae, especially of humorous minutiae.

Bob told me about a yearly contest among copy editors at the London Times to see who could write the Most Boring Headline. The 1929 winning entry was apparently so beloved that the award was retired.

The Most Boring Newspaper Headline of All Time?

Small Earthquake in Chile

Not Many Dead

I’ve searched newspaperarchive.com for proof of the headline to no avail. I have found many stories – mostly by newspaper columnists – relating the same story. But never a facsimile of the headline itself. The closest is Cockburn’s own version from his 1956 book, “A Discord of Trumpets:”

“Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.’”

Cockburn is also credited with the quote, much beloved by newspaper folk: “Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.”

 

 

On a hallowed hill in Tennessee….

I was looking around in old University of Tennessee yearbooks, trying to find a sports team photo that resembled that very odd 1917 Kingsport High basketball team photo I posted recently.

Instead I found this early school song in the 1917 Volunteer. You don’t need to read past the first line to understand why it didn’t survive into the “Rocky Top” era:

Tennessee Song

When college joys and college lays

Have faded with their makers days;

When Sol's swift wheels have made us old,

And college life's a tale that's told,

Then Tennessee, Tennessee

Our hearts will ever turn to thee.

Thy Honor, Glory, Fame

Abroad we sing

With gladsome souls

We tribute bring.

 

 

Tales of New York….

It was 1981 and Diane Sawyer, a Louisville native, had just started a stint as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News with Charles Kuralt. The Louisville newspaper sent me to New York to write a story about her new gig.

Photographer Michael Coers and I had to get up very early – the eventual headline on the story would be “The Yawn Patrol” – to meet her at the Manhattan studio of CBS News.

We were finished by 9 a.m. so he and I decided to walk back to our hotel. It wasn’t far and we figured it would give us a chance to soak up some of that New York atmosphere, interact with the locals.

We hadn’t gone two blocks when we had to veer out onto the street because the sidewalk was blocked off with yellow crime scene tape.

Welcome to New York, right?

It was an apartment building blocked off and cops were going in and out, up and down the stairs. We joined the crowd watching the scene.

There was one patrolman standing near us in case any gawkers got too close.

An elderly woman next to me asked him what had happened.

“I’m not supposed to say but there was a murder in one of the apartments,” he said, matter of factly.

The woman shook her head knowingly. She’d been around the block. She knew how it was in New York.

Finally she asked him one more question.

“Is that a one bedroom or a two?”