With loss comes introspection, an affliction from which I've suffered all my life. What can I say: I muse in Hi-Def. That doesn't mean I'm smarter than you; it just means that if I ever got tossed in a car trunk and driven across state lines, I could entertain myself well into cattle country. Interior monologues will do that to a fella. Not that I hear voices. That you know of, anyway... Now, where was I?
Oh yeah, my mastery of distraction and it's many travel hazards. I'm already so reflective I can't back out of the driveway without a few birds flying into my car. I can't glance at my GPS without getting lost in thought. In the time it takes the yellow light to turn red, I can leave my body and fly around the block. Should a traffic jam ever block my progress, I usually go all Michael Stipe: crawling out on the top of some stranger's Buick and cradling myself while the jangly guitars no one else can hear drown out all those annoying car horns... You can imagine how unpopular this makes me during rush hour. Yes, if life were a side-view mirror, I'd be double-parked in the middle distance.
Which is why you'll have to forgive me if I've lost focus as of late. An enchanted being I've come to rely on has vacated this realm and he left no forwarding address. I guess deep down inside I know where he is, but that doesn't mean I'll stop searching the horizons for him any time soon.
They don't call them 'asshole magnets' just because it sounds cool. A fully exposed fanycam can attract morons from a five mile radius. Factor in a governmental center or packed sports bar and you have one more reason why you should keep one eye open and your head on a swivel. Just ask Ole Olson. The veteran KOIN photog was minding his own deadline outside a Portland courthouse the other day when inanity struck. Luckily for us, Olson struck back.
But let's back up a bit...
Apparently the taste of freedom didn't agree with Gary Kemple, for not long after dude was sprung from the pokey, he made a beeline for the gaggle of news crews backpedaling outside. They were there for someone else, but Kemple didn't let that stop him from insinuating himself in the rolling scrum. Before any of the reporters and photogs even noticed him, the pint-sized jailbird accused a KGW shooter of punching him. This led to a few moments of confusion as the group of journalists wondered to themselves why a body-double from Joe Dirt was suddenly getting his mullet in an uproar. Then, as quickly as he appeared, the man vanished.
But he came back.
Not to apologize, mind you, but to hock a greasy lob of pork-rind flavored chromosomes at yet another photog. Dude - get your delusions straight! How am I supposed to know what you're mad at when you spray the place with such abandon? Focus, man, focus! As it turned out, Kemple never got a chance to fully explain his rage, for in his rush to express his displeasure with the Fourth Estate, the little guy spat on the wrong cameraman.
That much is certain.
Unhappy at the felonious saliva running down his lens, KOIN photographer Ole Olson broke away from the pack, fished out his phone and began calling 911. This seemed to further enrage Kemple, for he began pushing the much taller photog. "Back off, buddy!" yelled Olson, using a much nicer nickname than I would chosen. But the strangely angry man did not back off. Instead he ratcheted up the action considerably by lifting his foot and stomping on Olson's camera.
With the sangfroid of a seasoned lenslinger, Olson broke out a whole barrel of whup-ass. Grabbing Kemple by the collar, he walked his would-be attacker into the chest of a roadie from Foghat. What the legendary British rock band was doing in Portland I have no idea, but their sizable stagehand soon took umbrage at the melee in his face and pushed the scuffling couple away. That's when Olson, in a series of maneuvers that would elicit cheers from photog lounges far and wide, put the crazy little man on his ass.
Pardon while I soak that in for a moment.
Ahhhhhhh.... the sweet smell of street justice. Or is that former inmate urine? I can never tell. Anyway, what followed was your standard issue schoolyard wrestling match. You know, the kind where the bigger kid rubs some younger punk's face in the pavement. Yes, we'd all like to catch it when it comes out on Imax, but here at The Lenslinger Institute we take no pleasure from others' misfortune - even if we did watch the clip in question about 74 times over chips and soda. Our verdict? Olson was more than justified in defending his camera's honor. Sure, he could have 'called the law' but what fun is that, when you can plant your knee in an opponent's throat?
In the end, Olson escaped the fray with only a minor eye injury and it's believed his camera will live to see another perp walk As for Kemple, cops ushered him to a nice, warm holding cell where he no doubt requested the guards turn on the local news to see how a real man celebrates his release from incarceration. Oh well, some folks will do anything to get on tee-vee.
Sorry about the lack of updates, but it's been a tough week here at Lenslinger Central. On Monday, my biological father Dick Carney died suddenly. Dick was more than the source of half my DNA. He was a loving old goat who didn't let a hard knock life stop him from assisting others. Ours was not a typical father-son relationship. Nothing was typical about the man. He was gruff, introspective and strangely eloquent. We shared a deep love of language and no one was more thrilled about what I've done here than he. Dick was something of a writer himself and he left a smattering of blog entries I will always treasure. He also left a wealth of material I'm just now going through and you can best believe I'll write again about his extraordinary life. For now, let me leave you with one of the many lessons he taught me:
"Feeling sorry for yourself? Don't like your lot in life? Get off your sorry ass and go help somebody. You'll be amazed what it will do for your day."
It's a fact too few people know: In 1961 a crippled B-52 dropped two megaton nuclear weapons on the farm community of Faro, North Carolina. I grew up a few miles from where those bombs landed and I always heard rumors about the night Wayne County was nearly erased. Recently, Bob Buckley and I caught up with survivors, witnesses and an author of a new book on the matter, who helped us piece together this anatomy of a (near) disaster...
More on the Making of the Goldsboro Broken Arrow
When retired Air Force officer Joel Dobson contacted me with news he'd written a book about the near annihilation, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. All my life, I'd heard vague claims of fire in the sky; I wanted facts and figures. On that, The Goldsboro Broken Arrow delivers. Dobson's SAC credentials shows through as he lists the risks of nuclear brinkmanship with a war planner's dead-eyed detachment. That's what a story like this requires. This is by far the definitive account of the incident and among those diagrams, charts and photos lie the bones of a blockbuster. Hear me, Hollywood: King Kong ain't got nuthin on the likes of Scott Tulloch, Jack ReVelle and Adam Mattocks.
That's Lieutenant Adam Mattocks, thank you very much. He was aboard the B-52 Stratofortress when it developed a fuel leak, as a back-up pilot withOUT an ejection seat. When the aircraft began to break apart he dove through an opening in the crumbling behemoth. Miraculously, he made it safely to the ground, where a rural family didn't know what to make of the tall black man with a parachute on his back standing on their front porch. Fifty one years later, Mattocks welcomed Bob Buckley and I up their own porch as we dragged lights and tripod inside. His lovely wife held the family dachshund as the man who fell to Earth recounted every inch of his descent.
Of course, much of what Mattocks described would be hard to imagine without any visual proof. Luckily for those of us in the eyeball business, a treasure trove of evidence has slowly been unearthed. Author Joel Dobson deserves endless credit for compiling what does exist and his enthusiasm for the project didn't end when his book hit the presses. The wreckage, the crew, the area of impact: seeing leads to believing. Among the many photos he provided, this one proved to be the most iconic. Hey, I don't care how shrewd a wordsmith you are, nothing conveys the idea of global disaster averted like a picture of an eleven foot long thermonuclear bomb hanging from a neighborhood tree.
One person who doesn't need a picture album to remember that white hot winter night is Billy Reeves. He was eighteen years old when parts of the B-52 and its deadly payload struck the Faro farmland across from his home. Reeves saw it all and even helped the Air Force with the extraordinary search that followed. For half a century he's assured anyone who doubted this story's veracity that the sky did indeed turn red that night. When Bob and I met Reeves in that fabled field, he surprised me by reeling off names of the many Pittmans we both knew. Then he told me what his own family thought the night vessels of death rained down from above. "Mama thought it was End Times." he said.
Just so you don't think Viewfinder BLUES has gone all Ken Burns on ya, here's a modern day screen-grab of a cutting-edge journalist in action. Okay, so it's just a random snapshot of my friend Eric lost in daydream. Maybe he was pondering one of life's great mysteries, I dunno. Some news shooters mentally calibrate disc space during press conferences. Others hallucinate. Me, I whip out the ole digital and photograph my cohorts. Sure, they roll their eyes, hide behind their tripods, even shoot me the occasional bird ... but deep down inside their crusty little hearts, I believe they like it.
Though that would explain all the brake problems I've had with Unit Four.
Ever since television engineers stitched together the first test pattern out of stolen horse blankets, lenslingers like me have been expected to ride side-saddle. Case in point: this extraordinary find by broadcast archivist Amanda Emily. That's Harry Truman in the upper right. Known for his two mile hikes before breakfast, here the ex-President pounds the San Diego pavement with cronies in tow. It must have been a celebrated troll, for why else would KOGO-TV plant their finest photog in a Radio Flyer? It had to be a bumpy ride - even with a suited cohort at the helm, er, handle... Ya know, this is the part of the post where I usually make fun of the shooter's wardrobe, heap scorn on the retro-tech or just generally disrespect the mission at hand. I was all about to go down that road when Amanda hepped me to the man in the wagon...
That's George Potter, a man who had lived several lifetimes before he ever plopped down in that child's toy. In World War II, he was a member of the famed 'Easy Company' - the group of soldiers immortalized in the book and mini-series Band of Brothers. Potter parachuted into Normandy, lost his rifle in mid-flight and landed on a rooftop. Later, he received the Bronze Star and at one point broke his leg. But when he heard E Company was about to jump into Holland, he removed his cast, fled the hospital rejoined his unit in time. George Potter survived the war, but he didn't come home completely intact. He didn't talk much about what he saw there, but he did once tell his sons about pulling the boots off a dead soldier to appease his own frostbitten feet. Surely, there were even darker moments overseas and while Potter was clearly tortured by many of them, he wasn't the kind to foist that on his family. Instead, he went to work - eventually landing as TV News photographer for KOGO-TV (now KGTV). What George Potter saw during (and after) the war could no doubt fill a book, but much of it has been lost in the dustbin of history. One thing is for sure: there's often more to that man behind the camera than you see at first glance.
Hey kids, what do serial killers and TV news photogs have in common? Their wardrobe, of course! That and their habit of driving around with 'kits' in the trunk. You know, the kind of thing everyone keeps handy: bleach, jumpsuits, a few tarps. Hey, you never know when you're gonna have to go cover a mudslide, wash up after a bloodbath, profile a panhandler or simply off a hobo. Either way, you're gonna want to be prepared, so I suggest staying up late at night categorizing your supplies. Hmm? No, hanging upside down in your closet while you sleep should be optional, though it may help some of those sorer torsos out there. What you really want to do is learn the location of the nearest sorority house, er Radio Shack. Look, the urge to feel the thrum of a fresh nine volt could strike at any moment. You don't wanna be circling some dark parking lot, waiting for some hero type to start ogling your logos. So know when to blend, how to hide and where to find the exits. Master that and you'll go as far as your heart of darkness or fanny-pack full of pork rinds will take you. Just keep you head about you. Hell, you may even wanna cover it up altogether. OOH, I know! Go to your local tractor-pull and see if they're still giving away bright orange ski-masks as door prizes. That way, you'll always be in style -- whether you're bum-rushing ribbon-cuttings or working on your earlobe collection.
