A relic from the past

A frequent reader sent me this which will be familiar to only those who are very old. Click to see full size version.

This website has some great pictures of "old" Flint and photos of the trolleys.

Top 10 lists - a waste of good trees

While in California my wife and I made a short trip to Stockton to visit a man who worked with me at the Michigan State News back in the 1970s.

Mike Klocke was the sports editor at the SN when I was editor-in-chief during 1978-79. He was a great sports editor and I always knew he would go far. Mike has covered many top sports events, including the Super Bowl and was at the famous "earthquake" World Series game in San Francisco.

At some point he left the toy department, as news reporters sometimes referred to the sports department, and went to news and is now the editor of the Stockton Record.

At lunch we caught up with Mike and his wife, Kerry (hope that's the right spelling) who he met during our days at MSU.

During the conversation we were talking about stupid journalism lists and gimmicks and he mentioned that Stockton had made the top of the Forbes "Most Miserable Cities" list in 2009. In anticipation of the list in 2010, he wrote a great column that could serve residents in Flint and other cities frequently dumped on as a template for how to respond.

Two other cities close to my heart also made the list, Buffalo N.Y. (8) and Flint, MI (5).

Mike checks in here from time-to-time so he will appreciate that when I looked up his column from last month the ticker for the Record listed the following stories, which do tend to accentuate the negative:

•Stockton man held in girlfriend's slaying
•Man arrested in midtown Stockton after trying to light his wife on fire
•Stockton facing 'horrific' budget cuts
•Forbes ranks Stockton No. 2 in miserable index
This Week's Most Viewed
•Tearful goodbyes for 'J.J.'
•Man arrested in Stockton in death of his girlfriend
•Teen shot in back in Weston Ranch
•Man stabbed over parking spot
This Month's Most Viewed
•New details emerge in 3-year-old's gunshot death
•Boy, 3, killed near Quail Lakes
•Edison High grieving over loss of football star (UPDATED 1:32 p.m.)
•Actor roped in Linden cattle scheme

Home sweet home - soon

Normal (if there is such a thing) blogging will return shortly.

Precision Cadillac driving

This was a pretty cool You Tube.

Things that make you go hmmmmmm!

I've shared a bunch of these on Facebook, but here's the whole list:

1.. Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

2. Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

3. If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know?

4. If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?

5. Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?

6. Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?

7. Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?

8. Why do "tug" boats push their barges?

9. Why do we sing "Take me out to the ball game"
when we are already there?

10. Why are they called " stands" when they are made for sitting?

11. Why is it called "after dark" when it really is "after light"?

12.. Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?

13.. Why are a "wise man" and a "wise guy" opposites?

14. Why do "overlook" and "oversee" mean opposite things?

15. Why is "phonics" not spelled the way it sounds?

16. If work is so terrific, why do they have to pay you to do it?

17.. If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

18.. If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

19. If you are cross-eyed and have dyslexia, can you read all right?

20. Why is bra singular and panties plural?

21.. Why do you press harder on the buttons of a remote control
when you know the batteries are dead?

22. Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?

23. How come abbreviated is such a long word?

24. Why do we wash bath towels? Aren't we clean when we use them?

25.. Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

26. Why do they call it a TV set when you only have one?

27.Christmas - What other time of the year do you sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of your socks?

28. Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway ?
I dunno, why do we?

A trip to Shadowbrook

For a treat I took Joan to the Shadowbrook Restaurant in Capitola last night. It was a place I used to go many, many years ago and always had a good reputation for good food and atmosphere.

You take a little cable car down to the restaurant and even though it was raining last night it was still a beautiful sight.

Luckily we hit the place on a night when the seafood entrees were all $15.95 (they are usually $27-$30) and everything is ala carte. So it didn't break the bank either.

If you take the virtual photo tour on the Shadowbrook website you'll see more photos. (We ate in the Greenhouse Room).

It's a great place and if you ever get to this area of California, put it on your dinner list.

Hello from California

California: The land of my birth, the source of my mirth.

Always love coming to visit here, but have been at the mercy of the single, public computer at the hotel we are staying at for the last few days, so hopefully that explains the delay in posting.



The picture was taken yesterday by my son, Timothy, on the long Wharf at Santa Cruz. The pelican was very nice until you didn't feed it then it just snapped at you.

You can see what a nice day it was. Weather today is supposed to turn to rain and tomorrow we head back over the hill to the East Bay.

America the Beautiful

I really like this rendition of America the Beautiful sent to me by a frequent reader in California:

California, Here we are!

Flight connections went well and no one blew up their underwear so we are safely in California.

Had my annual battle with the rental car company over the kind of car they were going to have me drive.

After several false starts with their foreign selections I prevailed and am driving a Ford Fusion (I originally posted Focus only because I needed to focus) for the time we are here.

"Sir, I'm not giving you one of THOSE Toyotas," the man said.

"Oh, it's not about the Toyota problem," I said. "It's about only driving American brand cars."

Then when he saw my Michigan driver's license, it made sense to him. The Focus is a really nice car, so far.

Blogging to slow temporarily

For the next couple weeks I will be traveling and sometimes out of range of an Internet connection. So posting will be infrequent, but I have a couple things prearranged to appear.

Walter, a fraternal twin to Joe Biden?

My Dad, who holds out hope for President Obama to get things turned around, listened to the State of the Union speech (I skipped it to watch a miserable Red Wings hockey game). After watching the vice-president for an hour or so he noted a similarity between the Jeff Dunham character, Walter, and Joe Biden.

Too true to be funny

Overheard in the Newsroom had this gem:

#2830: Managing Editor, admiring a rival newspaper: “Any chance we can hire their guy to do our layouts?” Art Director: “You laid him off last year.”

A story of a really high pay wall, with really low results

Newsday (corrected from original version) has had very poor results with its pay wall. Only 35 subscriptions since it was instituted. There's a little more to the numbers than that, but still pretty grim. People have become far too used to free news content. (Hat tip to Jan for the link).

A little CBS report to get your blood warm on a cool morning

Remember the Copenhagen Climate Summit? You know, the one that accomplished nothing. Well, the bill came due recently and CBS News did a great job of breaking down the costs of the travel and lodging of the dozens of Democrats, Republicans, State Department, White House and other bureaucrats, many who brought spouses, who attended.

It's good to know that while many folks in this country are suffering and having trouble putting food on the table, that there is plenty of pork to eat in Washington.

Rocks in the hubcaps

Most folks know that I love good police stories, especially quirky, funny ones. I stopped over at AnnArbor.com for my monthly visit and found a column, not unlike the column I started at the Flint Journal in 1990.

This column is written by a retired Ann Arbor detective sergeant and this column was about police pranks. It was pretty good and included a prank about putting rocks in hubcaps of a fellow police officers car. (The graphic with the story showed a fancy wheel - see photo with this post- but not a hubcap. It may be more a factor of young people not knowing what a "hub cap" is). The columnist was referring to an episode at the Milan Police Department that had gotten into the news.

As I have mentioned here before, I worked for two California police departments for seven years before going back to MSU to study journalism.

And as the AA2.com writer said pranks are as much a part of police departments as ticket books.

Here's a few that I remember from my days in uniform.

We had our own firecracker episode at our police department. We had one officer, Paul F, who was very skittish about noises. One night he was sitting at the dispatch desk relieving the dispatcher during her dinner about 3 a.m.

An officer had a stash of firecrackers that he had confiscated in the trunk of his police car. Parking down the street from the police department he snuck up and lit a string of the firecrackers under the dispatcher's window.

Not wanting a good practical joke to go unwatched, several of us had parked nearby and watched as Paul F dove under the desk at the first sound of the firecrackers. He then put out a call over the radio and we all pulled up and fessed up to the joke.

In today's world, that probably could have gotten us all fired. Back then it was just part of the job.

All the police cars were keyed the same, in other words all the car keys worked in all the patrol cars. We had been ordered not to idle the cars (to keep them warm) while we were at lunch or on a call. All of us had duplicate keys and could let the car run while locking it from the outside.

If we found one of our co-workers cars locked and running outside a restaurant and knew that it was out of view of the officer inside, we would often drop off our riding along partners to unlock the car and drive it back to the station. It was always fun to sit in the station to hear the frantic call from the officer trying to explain to the dispatcher that his car had been "stolen."

The high school had a 1/4-mile running track and in the middle of the night we would drive there and do our own version of NASCAR around it with our lights off. That was until a neighbor noticed the cars speeding around the track and called the police department.

From a distance they couldn't tell the racing vehicles were police cars. When the dispatcher put out the call about the racing cars at the high school, one of the officers responded that they were in the area and would check it out. Then they quietly left.

One of our officers used to brag about the gas mileage in his foreign car. Every day he would come to work telling us he was getting 30 or 35 miles to the gallon. So for a month we started adding a gallon or two of gas to his tank every shift.

Each day he would excitedly come to work and brag that he was suddenly getting 40-45-50 miles to the gallon. We, of course, would scoff at him and tell him he was crazy, but the ruse went on.

Finally, after a month of adding gasoline, we started siphoning it out of his car a gallon or two at a time while he was out on patrol. He started coming to work loudly complaining that there was "something wrong" with his car. His mileage had dropped from 50 to 20 and he was not happy.

At the point we found out he took it back to the dealer to complain about his now "horrible" gas mileage, we brought him in on the joke before he did something stupid to the dealer.

More later.

New York Times to install online pay system in 2011

The New York Times seems to be headed towards some financial sanity. The idea that news gathering has value is an important one.

When I was much younger people scoffed at the idea of cable television. "Who would pay for what they already get free?" Well, how did that pan out?

From the time two consecutive editors couldn't adequately answer the questions of how we could give away the Flint Journal content for free many have been frustrated by the devaluation of news gathering.

It's past time to take back the product.

Alice Shultz-Melton, retired FJ librarian, dies at 72

One of the first people I met when I arrived at the Flint Journal in 1989 was a news room librarian named Alice. She explained to me the extensive library and morgue that the newspaper maintained.

At the time there were four employees and an excellent library. The folks who worked in the library were always helpful and made doing story research really easy. She was always a graceful person who survived in a not so graceful environment.

So it was with sadness that I learned that Alice Shultz-Melton died last week. The obituary was published this week. Rest in Peace Alice.

Shultz-Melton, Alice Marie formerly of Flint, MI. Passed away January 20, 2010 in Beaver Dam, KY. She was born August 23, 1937 through the union of Charlie Dee and Mary Alice Shultz in Haiti, KY. Alice graduated from Western High School in Owensboro, KY in 1955. Alice moved to Flint, MI. in 1969. She was married in 1981 to James V. Melton. She was a member of Grace Free Will Methodist Church. She was a board member of My Brothers Keeper. She was employed at The Flint Journal for 30 years as a librarian. She retired in 2000. She lived to cherish one son: Rev. John A. Williams, his wife Tanya; step-son James. V. Melton Jr.; step-daughter Naomi Martin and her husband Clarence all of Flint, MI; 23 grand children, one great-grandchild; one sister Loretta J. Finn and her husband Gilbert, from Beaver Dam, KY; two brothers Charles Wayne Shultz of Louisville, KY and William G. Shultz of Sacramento, CA; four nieces; two nephews. She was preceded in death by her parents and her husband, her step-daughter, three brothers and two nephews. A special thank you to Pastor and sis Campbell and New Life Missionary Baptist Church of Flint, MI. Services are at 12 noon Wednesday at Barnes Chapel United Methodist Church, Beaver Dam, KY. Burial will be in Oakwood Cemetery, Hartford, KY. Miller - Schapmire Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

Working my beat, looking for ladies walking the street

As a fan of "Overheard in the Newsroom" the following entry brought back a couple memories. First the entry: "#2776: Layout Designer: “When’s that story going to be done?” Crime Reporter: “The one on prostitutes? The research is getting expensive.”

During the 1990s we had a series of homicides involving prostitutes, many of them working on Dort Highway.

My editor, Roger, asked that I go find a prostitute working on the street and see if I could get a comment about whether they were fearful of the recent series of homicides and if they knew any of the working women who had been killed.

So there I was driving north and south on Dort like any regular John looking for a hooker. There were certain spots where they hung out, usually places with an easy access to motorists, like an abandoned store parking lot.

The women would appear and disappear almost as quickly as you were able to turn around and try to talk to them.

Finally, I spotted a would be worker and pulled up next to her, identified myself and asked her if I could simply interview her for a minute. For a Dort Highway hooker, this lady looked pretty nice, but she was not interested in an interview.

Finally after several attempts to get a comment, she leaned in and said "you're messing up our decoy sting, Jim, I'm a cop?" Should have known by the lack of needle sticks in her arm and the fact she was attractive.

Later, my cop sources at the Flint Police Department had a good laugh at my expense as they recounted my conversation with the decoy that they had been listening to over the wire worn by the female police officer. No doubt some of them were salivating over the potential of arresting a Flint Journal reporter on a soliciting charge, but were disappointed when they discovered I was only looking for a comment not something else.

So my patrols began again, this time I found a "real" prostitute, but she insisted that I was costing her money by being parked next to her and asking questions. She said I either had to pay the equivalent for a "session" or get away from her.

When I told her I couldn't pay her for the interview, she told me "I could use some cigarettes." I found out what brand she smoked and went to the nearby 7-11 to buy her a "gift" of cigarettes. In my own mind I justified the "gift" as different from a cash payment for the interview. Probably a bad decision.

By the time I returned about 10 minutes later, she was gone. My patrol continued and about 20 minutes she was back at her spot. So I gave her the packs of cigarettes and she gave me an anonymous statement on how "a girl had to work" and that she wasn't worried about any killer because she had a pretty regular clientele that she knew and trusted.

Then she let me know that I had overstayed my cigarette bribe.

Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest rides again

Some people wait for their favorite awards shows, The Golden Globes or The Academy Awards, but for me I like the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest sponsored by San Jose State University.

Sometimes called the "It was a dark and stormy night...contest" the judges honor the worst opening book lines that people submit. Even I once entered with a dramatic opening that I had actually witnessed at a crime scene outside the Carriage Town Mission in Flint.

My line, which did not win, but got an honorable mention postcard from the judges was:

"Beer mixed in the blood oozing from the knife wound in the drunk's abdomen was so fresh that it still had a head on it."

A detective at the scene pointed out to me that the bubbles I saw in the gutter was actually the fresh beer foam that was leaking from the victim's belly. The fight, as I recall some 15-20 years later, was over a 40-ounce bottle of beer two drunks were trying to share.

Man was I wrong

Guess that Senate seat in Massachusetts doesn't actually belong to the Kennedy family or the Democrats. I'm not one that tends to believe media hype and this result may have been a combination of voter remorse, but also a factor of a really, really bad Democrat candidate.

Next time, learn your baseball Martha. President Obama invested his own political clout in the race by going there at the last minute, so he has to be a little upset today. CNN said last night that Obama won Massachusetts a year ago by 26 points. That's a stunning reversal by any one's estimation.

That said, my candidate, Joseph Kennedy, the only Kennedy running for Kennedy's seat, trailed badly. My dream of a growing, influential third party, remains just a dream.