What I Really Think—as Published in the AP retirement newsletter

 I have never enjoyed writing as much as I do with the newspaper column I began a year ago. Every week in the South Boston (VA) News & Record, I say what I think. What? Journalists of my era weren’t  supposed to do that! It’s he-said, she-said, just the facts, ma’am.

 

Sometimes I actually do reporting, as in a news story. Those columns didn’t get much attention, if I trust the reaction on Facebook, where I also publish the column.

 

But the numbers take off when I write about myself. Moi? I am nobody. Why does anybody care? I am a very private person—except in print. What am I? A reality show, like the Kardashians?

 

 I got dozens of reactions when I wrote that I never think about death, mainly from people who felt the same way. When I described what I watched on TV as a kid, it was very popular. They liked my experiences with my wife’s bed & breakfast too.Another hit was a column about my seventh-grade teacher, who inspired a rock ‘n’ roll star (John Fogerty). I wrote those off the top of my head, with no reporting at all. (Oh, I did misspell the teacher’s  name. Argggh!)

 

I couldn’t have written these as a young person. I think my perspective gives them some gravitas. Best of all, I run into people all the time who have read the column in this small town and comment on it. Some of them have never met me before. When I was at AP, perhaps millions read or heard some of  my stories about economic reports from the government, but I would never hear from any of them (unless we got sued,  which never happened.) 

 

One problem: I am afraid of offending anyone. I don’t like conflict. I could never have been an investigative reporter. I avoid politics and local controversies in the column.

The only complaints I have gotten were from a lady upset that I blamed waitresses for late service (It’s the kitchen’s fault!) and a relative, who didn’t like a veiled reference to his son. Big mistake. Can’t please everyone.

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. Spring commencements are wonderful. I used to love driving past Constitution Hall in Washington and watching the young people and their families joyously celebrating their achievement. For some, as they faced a difficult adulthood, you knew that may be the high point of their lives.

 

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I enjoy biographies of musical figures, such as Billy Joel, Burt Bacharach and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, as they get a fan base and make it big. But when they get rich and older, they have a lot of personal, legal, music and health problems.Would rather skip that.

 

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It is no wonder that King Charles’ coronation was so impressive. He has had 70 years to plan it. I wonder if the British tabloids will spoil his reign.

 

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I am always skeptical of copyright lawsuits like the unsuccessful one filed against singer Ed Sheeran. For decades, “Happy Birthday” was protected by copyright, and the author’s heirs and later a corporation  were supposed to collect royalties every time it was sung publicly. Oops. I never paid any at my daughter’s birthday parties. Fortunately, a judge declared the song in the public domain in 2016.

 

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Why is it so terrible to cough, talk or cheer while professional golfers are putting or tennis players are volleying, when it is just fine to badger a basketball player making free throws with all the noise you can muster? They both require concentration. Doesn’t make sense to me.

 

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My favorite movie title of all time, “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.” It tells you the whole story of a hurried world vacation tour.

 

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I really like the radio stations you can get here. The jazz station in Durham, WNCU, 90.7, is a lot better than the one in Washington because it plays a lot more jazz. The classical station, WCPE, 89.7, in Durham, is also better because it doesn’t carry news. 

 

 

South Boston’s local station, WHLF, 95.3, has the adult contemporary music I like from the 1980s and 1990s. For once I don’t mind ads, because I might buy something around here.

 

Are you in the silent generation? Shhhh!

 

Some younger people assume I am a baby boomer—among those who were born between 1945 and 1964, Well, no, I am part of the “Silent Generation,” just before that. Shhh!

 

Boomers were part of the huge population that came after World War II, when the consumer economy rebounded and the country was full of confidence. They were a rebellious lot, whose parents may have been influenced by Dr. Benjamin Spock, who told them in 1946 that they should be more lenient with their children.

 

In my generation it was “Children should be seen and not heard.”

Do what you are told. Don’t make waves. Shhh!

 

Yes, I belong with the Silents, even though I went to the tumultuous UC Berkeley. I don’t remember many rebellious students, just about all in my generation, when I attended from 1959 to 1963. But there were some radicals on the Daily Californian student newspaper, where I was an editor. We went with other students to the San Francisco City Hall on May 14, 1960 to view a House Committee On Un-American Activities hearing. When we couldn’t get in, things got out of control. The students rioted and the police washed them down the stairs with fire hoses. The event is now considered the start of the Bay Area protest movement. What did I do when I couldn’t get in? I went to the ball game.

 

By contrast, my sister, a baby boomer, went to Berkeley five years after I did, in the wake of the Free Speech Movement era of 1964-65. Attending class while helicopters dropped tear gas, she considered herself a radical and still does.

 

They might as well call my generation the Lost Generation. Especially when it comes to music. The Greatest Generation, those born before us up to 1928, had big band music. You can find that on most music channels. The boomers have the Beatles and hard rock. Other than Frank Sinatra, there is barely a hint anywhere of early 1950s music. I’m talking about Perry Como, Doris Day, Patti Page and Andy Williams. Not that I miss it.

 

While 1960s icons are still celebrated, how many people remember these individuals and terms? King Farouk, James Dean, the Ink Spots, Bobby Sox, the 38^th parallel, the Green Door, 77 Sunset Strip, Hernando’s Hideaway, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, “daddy-o,” coonskin caps, Crusader Rabbit, Estes Kefauver, Grace Kelly, The Drifters. Oh, except the Drifters were here Friday night at The Prizery!

 

So I can’t help it if you don’t hear a lot from me, or if I am not taking to the streets for change, ir is my Silent Generation coming through. Shhh! 

My History of TV

 I enjoy telling younger people what it was like before TV. We played outside, tried board games and listened to  radio shows such as Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly.

 

But in 1950, the neighborhood kids all flocked to someone’s house to see Hopalong Cassidy on TV. I was gone so much my parents finally bought a 14-inch TV with a ring of light around the edges to protect your eyes.  Guess that didn’t really work.

 

Vertical hold was the biggest problem: The screen kept rolling up and down. The first shows on the only three channels came on at about 5 p.m., including Howdy Doody, and later on, Milton Berle. After Berle was signed to a 30-year contract, NBC executives discovered that popularity was fleeting, and they were stuck.

 

I watched entirely too much TV, but nobody saw any harm in that at the time. Today I would have been a video game addict. I even used money from my paper route to buy an old TV to watch Charlie Chan and other movies in my room.

 

Soon, there were great dramas on TV, high-quality shows like Playhouse 90, Hallmark Hall of Fame and Studio One, performed live as if they were on stage. We saw Peter Pan and the premiere of Cinderella the musical, right in our living rooms. This was amazing. It was called the Golden Age of TV, and it was.

 

Then the networks discovered ratings. They could find out what people really watched. The average viewers didn’t want quality drama. They wanted Westerns! When they got tired of that, TV disintegrated into the trashy stuff we saw afterward.

 

I was so fascinated with TV that I made up my imaginary TV listings, quite odd for a 10 to 12-year-old. A waste of time, right?

 

Well, not quite. Thirty-five  years later, I was hired to be editor of a couple of magazines for satellite TV viewers. There were hundreds of channels! These had all of the shows being sent by networks to cable TV operators around the country. People with satellite dishes got a sneak peek at them. I was definitely prepared!

 

Those listings don’t work anymore. Even TV Guide became a shadow of its former self as TV listings moved online. Besides hundreds of cable channels, there are thousands of streaming offerings.

 

So to find out what to watch TV, many people go through those 1,000 channels, read reviews somewhere or open up Netflix and other streaming services to scan their offerings. Others, like Pickett, hear about some shows from a friend. Each streaming  service seems to have that one show that just can’t be missed. You need to pay for a “trial” subscription but it is so difficult to cancel once they have your credit card!

 

So sometimes, after doing extensive research on the night’s fare, I say to myself, “I think I’ll just read a book.”

 

 

 

 

Worst of times? Or not.

 These are terrible times” I keep hearing. Violence, disrespect, disaster. “It’s never been this bad.”:

 

Well, yes it has. There were World War II with the Holocaust; the Great Depression, and Bubonic Plague, for example

 

When were there good times? Certainly not the ‘60s with war and protests or the ‘70s with recession, Watergate and gasoline lines.

 

How about the 1950s? There was a postwar boom, a smiling general as president, no profanity on TV. But what about racial prejudice, few jobs for women, polio—oh, and the Korean War? We were convinced we would be annihilated by atomic bombs in World War III by now.

 

I do think climate change is a worry. But If you are down and fretting over who is president or who history might be president….you would be depressed at any time in.  Maybe work for a candidate? Or turn off TV news? Got to move on.

Durham: When We Need an Urban Fix

 We’re often asked how we get by in a small town after leaving the culture, restaurants, stores and major events in Washington, D.C. Our answer: We’ve got Durham. It’s only 50 miles away.

 

         When one of us has a medical appointment at Duke or elsewhere, we are sure to stop off at Costco or Whole Foods to stock up on some of the things we can’t find in South Boston, VA. In Arlington, we lived only three blocks from a Costco, but now we seem to buy a lot more there than we ever did.

 

         Do you ever go into a Costco store? There is something about everything that says, “Buy me, buy me!” I don’t know how they do it. We bring a cooler and get loads and loads of frozen goods, vegetables and paper products that we expect to use—some day.

 

         Daytime events are wonderful. I even found a noontime weekday  jazz series at North Star Church of the Arts. The Durham Bulls Triple-A baseball games are cheaper and easier to manage than Washington Nationals games. And just imagine: four Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) sports teams and a major league hockey team (the Hurricanes) within 80 miles. I’d love to go to a Duke basketball game, but tickets I saw advertised were outrageously priced. 

 

         If it is a night event, sometimes I will stay overnight rather than drive back in the dark. I can pay for it out of money I saved by not paying rent anymore in Arlington. There are terrific shows at the Durham Performing Arts Center, the Carolina Theater and the Duke Cathedral. Last week I saw the Duke university Jazz Ensemble at Baldwin Auditorium for $10, with headliner Cyrus Chestnut, a top-flight pianist.

 

         Pickett loves the Duke Gardens, a beautiful park with flowers blooming through much of the year. There is lots to see at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. We seek out  unique restaurants, such as Bleu Olive and Indian Monsoon, and Pickett likes Mateo, which serves tapas. We love Indian food, and have probably eaten more in Durham than we used to in Washington.

 

         The Raleigh-Durham airport is a reasonable 62 miles from Cluster Springs and even has nonstop flights to San Francisco. There is decent passenger rail service from Lynchburg and Danville. Durham is also an option, but the trains to D.C. are slower.

 

         I miss a lot of people in Washington but haven’t been back much. There is a lot to do down here.

Let a Chatbots Write This Column? No Way!

 

 I decided to have one of the new AI chatbots (Artificial Intelligence) write this column. After I saw the result, I threw it away and wrote it myself.

 

I tried Google’s experimental Bard chatbot on a computer and Microsoft’s Bing on a phone. You write down a question or make a request and you get either a written or spoken answer. I asked Bard to write the column for me after submitting notes I had jotted down.

 

It was going to be a fairly positive column, but then I looked at what the chatbot wrote: “Chatbots have the potential to revolutionize the way we consume news….They help us to stay informed about current events and make more informed decisions.”

 

I never said that. It barely touched on my main grievance: I had submitted the notes for a previous article about a homeless shelter in Danville to see what would happen. The result was well done and would have gotten an A in English class. But it made up quotes that I never got from my subject. Maybe from the shelter’s website? Is this the future of news? And it was dull, dull, dull.

 

Later, I asked the chatbot to write a comedy skit out of it. I admit that it is hard to make humor out of homelessness. But it wasn’t funny at all. These bots have no sense of humor!

 

I was surprised that these chatbots couldn’t tell me what time it was or what the weather was unless I provided my location. They didn’t seem to know what time zone we were in. They seem to only juggle words together or look things up on the Internet.

 

 I was pleased that it could tell me the 10 best basketball and baseball players and jazz musicians of all time. Unfortunately, almost all sports figures were modern ones. I think they got the info from articles written by writers who had no recollection of the past.

 

Neither model had trouble telling me who was the president of the United States, but they also wouldn’t predict the 2024 election. In fact, they wouldn’t even give me odds for sports games being held tonight.

 

I was glad that these chat bots didn’t give me any information about myself. It means solicitors can’t find me any easier than they already do. I was surprised that Bard knew a lot about our bed and breakfast.

 

These devices did a great job finding recipes or how-to instructions I couldn’t find elsewhere. I was disappointed that its list of the top 10 stories of the day included a few that seemed old.

 

Will they make journalists obsolete? For routine stories, maybe.  I was never able to recognize later what I wrote for The Associated Press because many articles were formulaic. Unemployment reports, routine crime stories and earnings reports only require a programmed brain. So maybe a human doesn’t need to write them.

 

We have more information at our command than ever now, but it is much harder to separate fact from fiction. Even videos can be easily tampered with. I think AI is here to stay whether we like it or not. They couldn’t stop VCR and recorded music copying, the spread of leaked documents or even the atomic bomb, for that matter. We have to get used to it.