At last. Now it can be told

 For years, I kept a dark secret, carefully hidden from public view. I was embarrassed to let the world know:

I was going to church.

 

Really? It’s no secret now. When you are 83 years old, with the grim reaper breathing down your neck, of course you go to church!

 

I am covering all bets now by being involved in three, yes three, churches: Mt. Carmel PresbyterianChurch in Turbeville, First Baptist Church in South Boston and Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C.

 

So, what happened? As a young adult, I didn’t go much but I found comfort in church as 21-year-oldreporter in Dover, Del. I even sang in the choir. My beliefs didn’t run very deep, but I liked a place where loving people set aside their weekday struggles to ponder the meaning of life. What and who is God?

 

No one I worked with knew I went there. I mean, it isn’t cool to go to church, especially as a journalist. Looking for scandal, you certainly believe in original sin, but not much in salvation. You are cynically uncovering the misdeeds of bad people and thrilled when you can say: “Gotcha!!” 

 

After I left Dover, a church member outed me to my former boss, who laughed out loud when he told me about it over the phone. He even put it in the history book he wrote about the newspaper!

 

I did go to church a few times in Las Vegas, but it was Sin City—not appropriate! Going to Glide Methodist Church in San Francisco was considered cool though—a defiant black pastor with a rock ‘n’ roll band.

 

In Washington, I found Dumbarton during a dark spot in my career when I had no one to turn to. I can’t say I was “born again,” but I found welcoming people in a kind of family away from my California hometown.

 

Of course, I didn’t tell my drinking buddies or fellow journalists about this highly subversive habit.  Meanwhile, I was churning out church publicity, the modern form of evangelism.

 

My secret interest became useful at U.S. News & World Report, where few on the staff knew anything about religion. I wrote about inclusive language in churches, television evangelists and the 200thanniversary of the Methodist Church in the U.S. in 1984.

 

The magazine called on maybe a dozen staff members to collaborate on a story, “the religious left fights back against Jerry Falwell and the right.” All I had to do was get out my church directory and call six or seven members of this left-leaning church who were active in the movement.

“We couldn’t have done this story without you,” my boss told me.

 

Since judgment day has not come yet, what tangible benefits have I gotten from my flirtation with the afterlife? Well, the main one came in 1981, when I was assigned with two others to help serve at Dumbarton’s coffee hour. “Who is this Pickett Craddock, on the list?” I asked a woman friend. “Oh, she’s a single woman, Mike. You ought to get to know her,” she said, pointing her finger at my nose.

Well, I did, and we are still together. I did better finding a woman at church than in a singles bar. I got one who shares my values.

 

And to this day Pickett still brings snacks and sometimes signature dishes from the bed & breakfast to Mt. Carmel on Sundays. (Hm, maybe I should help her.)

 

Why did’t I save more copies?

Imagine my shock when I found out last week that copies of Orbit Video magazine, which I managed, are now being sold online for $40 to $49 apiece.

Why didn’t I save more from the stacks of copies before it went under in 1989? (And why didn’t I save my old baseball cards?) I have one copy left, but I want to keep it.

Rare magazines often become collector’s items for some odd reason. Maybe we should have produced more of them.

It all started when my boss, the owner of Satellite Orbit magazine, decided to diversify with a monthly periodical that had reviews and features about movie stars. National Enquirer had just pulled the plug on the only other videotape magazine out there. But we figured we were smarter and could be successful by selling them directly at video stores.

We got tons of VHS tapes, reviewing from 50 to 100 new releases every month. One lady had the joy of reviewing maybe 30 of them, one per day. We took the rest of them home to look at. Unfortunately, most of them were utterly dreadful. There was a surplus of horror and gore films that were tough to watch.

We also had a videogame section. A 22-year-old guy was in charge of the reviews, a job that many teenage boys would have adored. I liked playing electronic golf games.

We added all kinds of features to the magazine. One of my biggest-ever challenges as an editor was handling a horoscope column. The writer was bored with simple lists of the month’s outlook for Leos and Sagittarius and wanted to write feature articles about astrology instead. No, thank you.

Our readership never took off. Research showed that customers at video stores were rarely happy. Theycouldn’t find the movie they wanted and were in no mood to buy a magazine. Just candy!

We found that our biggest fans were not Joe Sixpack butvideophiles--movie crazed people who would watch them endlessly all day.

Finally, after about 11 months, publication stopped. No more free movies and video games. We ended up with a negative circulation! How is that possible? We counted people as subscribers as soon as they signed up. But when they failed to pay, we had to dock them from the count, thus a negative circulation.

So, we stuck with Satellite Orbit, the viewing guide for people with large dishes. But we could see the writing on the wall: The TV networks started scrambling their satellite signals, making people pay for the shows they saw. And small dishes were hitting the market with online viewing guides that made paper guides unnecessary.

Now I have to pay for streaming movies. Yes, life is hard!

 

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Don’t miss “Fiddler on the Roof” by the Clarksville Community Players this weekend. On opening night last Friday, I thought the group put on one of its best performances ever. The singing, dancing and acting were terrific. Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.

What do I do next? I can’t decide

Sometimes I think I have too many choices.

Back in the Stone Age, when I grew up, there were three TV channels. I could watch a soap opera or a stupid game show or Superman. Well, that was easy! Superman!

For music, I would hear a song on the radio and possibly buy the record album. It cost a lot of money, so I would listen to it over and over until I was sick of it. Then I would buy another.

Books weren’t cheap either. If I didn’t find anything I liked in the library, I would buy something. “Peyton Place”. Remember that? I should feel guilty admitting that It had a few words of profanity in its hundreds of pages?  Or “Battle Cry,” another long but exciting book.

Today, I just can’t make up my mind. A tech mogul understated it when he boasted of 500 channels of TV in the future.  With streaming, cable and traditional TV, you can choose among thousands of shows. You can see high school football games in Nebraska, soccer in Spain and college gymnastics from Michigan. You can spend all day just deciding what to watch.

Now you don’t have to sit through a whole three-hour game and the commercials. You can go to YouTube and get the whole game trimmed down to two minutes. Instead of reading a book, you can download a podcast featuring an interview with the author. And you can pick out just about any song you want on YouTube, probably including a video of the performers.

So, is this any good for your brains? A new book, “The Siren’s Call” by Chris Hayes, says that we have lost the ability to focus. We are so bombarded by stimuli that we can’t turn our attention to one thing at a time.

I rarely read newspaper stories all the way through anymore, but I forced myself to read a review of the book and was given it as a gift and read it (well, listened to it on Audible.) If that is too much, you can go to ChatGPT or another AI platform and ask for a 500-word or 3,000-word summary. And without paying for it!

There are birds singing in the trees. Sorry, but I am busy scrolling through my Facebook feed. Your spouse wants your attention? After this podcast ends!

Am I going to change anything? Well, no. My wife thinks I live in “the cloud” anyway. I actually welcome all of these choices.

But please don’t ask me to spend five minutes hearing your funny story. Can you boil it down to 30 seconds so I can get back to commercial-free reruns of “Breaking Bad?”

Our attention-deficit Broadway music concert

 

My memories of Broadway music go back to the time my dad brought home the “South Pacific” album from the library. Then I remember buying my own album of “My Fair Lady” and eventually visiting New York as an adult to see “The Sound of Music” and the long-forgotten “Ben Franklin in Paris.” As a senior adult, I performed in six musicals in the Prizery Summer Theater and sang in the Washington Men’s Camerata’s Broadway concert at the Kennedy Center twice.

So it is no surprise that I was thrilled when the Danville Area Choral Arts Society decided to do a medley of “100 Years of Broadway” on March 23. As a chorus member, I thumbed through the music in January, struck by the volume.

What’s this? There are over 50 songs in the 45-minute medley? Just a whiff of each song from most of the greatest Broadway hits.? this made for an audience of  ADHD people?

“If you hear a song you don’t like, you’ll get a different one in less than a minute,” quips Christopher Swanson, the choir director.

At the first rehearsal, the younger people seemed puzzled by some of the old songs. Doesn’t everyone know “Button Up Your Overcoat” or “We’ll Take Manhattan?” Don’t they remember when Jerry Lewis made a revival hit of “Rockabye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody?”

Pretty soon they were more familiar to everyone. “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” “Tomorrow.” There wasn’t much music newer though than songs from “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.”

We were allowed to sign up for the numerous brief solos. I got “On the Street Where You Live” and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” What? I’m a lullaby singer, not James Cagney! Swanson threatened to give me an Uncle Sam costume. Hey, no, but I am going to wave a little flag I got from Dollar General.

I like how Swanson goes back over difficult passages and drills us on them until we get them right.

I asked him what it was like directing so many songs together. “It’s a particular challenge with all of the key changes and time signatures,” he said. When he cut out several, he had to find new ways to transition from one to the other.

I asked him why he was doing Broadway music. “We wanted to do a program on the light side of things, to balance with ‘Messiah,’ a heavier work, which we did in January. Some people in the audience will know most of it. Everybody will know at least a few songs. “

When he is not directing choirs, he is a professor of music specializing in voice, at Longwood University. He drives more than 60 miles to the rehearsals and performances from Farmville to Danville. Three members of the five-piece band Sunday are also Longwood faculty.

The concert also includes the Danville Area Choral Arts Society Children’s Choir and the DACAS Ringers handbell ensemble.

I think you’ll enjoy this show at 3 p.m.  Sunday March 23 at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, 3090 North Main St.

You can’t go home again

I feel privileged growing up across the bay from San Francisco, many Americans’ favorite city.

I I loved taking  my cousins, from Los Angeles, who could see Chinatown, Fisherman’s  Wharf, the beach and Market Street all in one day.

But I had mixed experiences the two times I lived in the city. I spent three months  in the seedy Tenderloin District when I got a summer job as a busboy at Manning’s Cafeteria in 1959.  It was a thrill seeing the San Francisco Giants regularly in their second year, with Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey.

But My father never should have allowed a 17-year-old to live there. When a drunk tried to climb in my hotel window from the fire escape, he was lucky I didn’t push him five stories to the ground. He got mixed up and had entered the wrong room.

I moved back in 1970, when I was transferred there by The Associated Press after I got tired of writing about gambling in Las Vegas. What a contrast! The Indians occupied Alcatraz, police were getting shot by radicals, students were demonstrating against the war. I got a whiff of tear gas myself covering a protest at my alma mater, UC Berkeley. I loved taking a cable car to see a press conference by famous lawyer Melvin Belli.

 My sister helped me find an apartment overlooking Ocean Beach with a big bay view window in April. But the fog rolled in by May and the sun hardly ever shone again until September. My huge picture window was covered by sand and salt all the time. And what ever happened to summer? I had sinus headaches all the time moving through the various climate zones  to visit my parents’ house in the East Bay.

After a year and a half, why would I accept a transfer to muggy Washington, D.C., from paradise on earth? For one thing, I didn’t like my current boss. And why wouldn’t a cardinal accept a transfer to Rome? Of course he would go. Look at the athletes (Aaron Rodgers, Joe Kapp) who left the temperate Bay Area for places like Green Bay, Wis., and Minneapolis.

I realized then that place isn’t all that matters. I worked all day and was too tired in the evening to do much. Saturdays were chore day for laundry, etc. So there is Saturday night for partying with friends and Sunday for leisure visits to the great sites. I could do that in Washington. Of course, the people you associate with matter too.

Maybe that’s why I never moved back, and why I am happy now in the opposite of San Francisco, Cluster Springs, VA.

What do I do next? I can’t decide

Sometimes I think I have too many choices.

Back in the Stone Age, when I grew up, there were three TV channels. I could watch a soap opera or a stupid game show or Superman. Well, that was easy! Superman!

For music, I would hear a song on the radio and possibly buy the record album. It cost a lot of money, so I would listen to it over and over until I was sick of it. Then I would buy another.

Books weren’t cheap either. If I didn’t find anything I liked in the library, I would buy something. “Peyton Place”. Remember that? I should feel guilty admitting that It had a few words of profanity in its hundreds of pages?  Or “Battle Cry,” another long but exciting book.

Today, I just can’t make up my mind. A tech mogul understated it when he boasted of 500 channels of TV in the future.  With streaming, cable and traditional TV, you can choose among thousands of shows. You can see high school football games in Nebraska, soccer in Spain and college gymnastics from Michigan. You can spend all day just deciding what to watch.

Now you don’t have to sit through a whole three-hour game and the commercials. You can go to YouTube and get the whole game trimmed down to two minutes. Instead of reading a book, you can download a podcast featuring an interview with the author. And you can pick out just about any song you want on YouTube, probably including a video of the performers.

So, is this any good for your brains? A new book, “The Siren’s Call” by Chris Hayes, says that we have lost the ability to focus. We are so bombarded by stimuli that we can’t turn our attention to one thing at a time.

I rarely read newspaper stories all the way through anymore, but I forced myself to read a review of the book and was given it as a gift and read it (well, listened to it on Audible.) If that is too much, you can go to ChatGPT or another AI platform and ask for a 500-word or 3,000-word summary. And without paying for it!

There are birds singing in the trees. Sorry, but I am busy scrolling through my Facebook feed. Your spouse wants your attention? After this podcast ends!

Am I going to change anything? Well, no. My wife thinks I live in “the cloud” anyway. I actually welcome all of these choices.

But please don’t ask me to spend five minutes hearing your funny story. Can you boil it down to 30 seconds so I can get back to commercial-free reruns of “Breaking Bad?”

What we do for love

Recently, I visited a high school friend who seemed quite happy after a woman had moved in with him for the first time (I think) in his 70s.I admired how much nicer the house and yard looked and how they did so many things together.

That’s quite admirable because it was hard sharing my house with someone even in my 40s. I had purchased a small home in Arlington, VA., neighborhood but it felt quite empty.

 When Pickett moved in, things changed quickly.  She brought her dog, her son and his dog. (I was not fond of dogs.) Soon my friendly neighbors hated me because her dog got loose and tangled with theirs.

She complained that the house was too small and that she could never tell which one was ours in our tract home neighborhood. So, OK, we looked for a new one. I wanted California modern. She wanted Victorian. Our realtor was quite frustrated.

Then he found one that was old-fashioned Victorian in the front and glassy, sun-filled California modern in an addition. Sold!!!

But now we had such a big house it, too, felt empty. We needed another child. (But not more dogs!) Later on, we adopted Sara. But I thought we should be married first.

 I proposed with flowers and a ring on bended knee at our house. She accepted and was happy  until it sunk in that we would have to plan and pay for a wedding.  So we had one at Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Washington, DC. This was no cookie-cutter wedding established by the church hierarchy.

Pickett upset the pastor by refusing to say “Til death do us part.” She said, “I already broke that promise once.” I arranged for a gospel choir from Anacostia to sing. She brought her large preschool class to the wedding to release balloons to the ceiling.

After the wedding, I expected life to go on exactly as before. But for the first time, Pickett packed my clothes for the honeymoon. I had never expected that and was not sure I liked it. And friends seemed to treat us differently. For a while, Pickett felt trapped by getting married a second time—until she opened a bed  & breakfast.

After those vows at the altar,  I knew that things had changed!

I guess for the better! Our 40th anniversary is May 11.

 

First a windfall, then the axe

One of the most bizarre situation I ever encountered in journalism came when I was a business writer at U.S. News & World Report from 1979 to 1987.

 

After founder David Lawrence died (and I wrote his obituary for AP), he left 100% of the company to the employees. As circulation grew, workers saw the stock value, determined by an appraiser, grow steadily.

 

 Many older employees decided it was time to cash out and retire. But there were new outside offers for the magazine, and when the bidding was over, its value skyrocketed seven-fold or 15-fold, depending on how it was measured.

 

The magazine staff was shocked but euphoric. The appraisers had never factored in the enormous value of the Washington, D.C., property the magazine owned, right between Georgetown and Dupont Circle. Editor Marvin Stone and his board, who could profit enormously, determined that it was the managers’ fiduciary responsibility to sell the company. For one thing, they couldn’t afford too many people retiring and demanding  cash. The eventual winner was Mortimer Zuckerman, a New York real estate magnate (like Donald Trump), who had designed and built our new office building and later purchased the Atlantic Monthly and New York Daily News.

 

Employees were greedily counting their forthcoming money, and many of them were about to become millionaires, depending on how long they had worked there. As a five-year veteran I didn’t become a millionaire, but I was able to put some money into retirement savings.

 

But wait! Those retirees who cashed out before the bidding war were steamed. Why should these newcomers get the money? The retirees filed suit, and the court battle went on for years, but we eventually got our money.

 

But wait again! In exchange for that big payout, most of us lost our jobs. Zuckerman didn’t like having people around who had gotten rich with his money. The place became so chaotic, we didn’t like working there anyway. People left mysteriously every few days, (Sounds like today’s federal government!)

 

 I was told to leave by the editor, David Gergen, who was a speech writer for presidents ranging from Nixon to Clinton and a famous PBS commentator. Giving me details of my firing was Kathy Bushkin, who was once presidential candidate Garry Hart’s press secretary and also a frequent talking head on TV. Months later, as Gergen was commenting on TV, I quickly switched channels, and there was Bushkin also discussing politics on CNN. I turned the TV  off.

 

But wait one more time!  Well after I landed on my feet at Satellite Orbit magazine, U.S. News’ circulation plummeted along with readership of other print media. (Was it because I left?) In 2010, U S. News got rid of its print magazine and today is best known (and controversial) for rating colleges and universities.