The Sam Whitmore Sampler

My Dad

October is always sad for me, being the month my Dad passed away. Here's a shot of him visiting at PC Week in 1991.

Old Newspapers, Vol. 6

It was Jun. 5, 1965. The S.F. Call Bulletin headline read "Marijuana Arrests at Galileo". Here is a condensed version of the article:

A Galileo High School track star and three other students are under arrest, charged with selling marijuana cigarets to a teacher.

The teacher, whose name was not disclosed, was working undercover with the police, according to Lt. Norbert Currie, head of the narcotics squad.

The teacher, Currie said, circulated freely about the school and one day overheard two girls talk about the "weed" -- the common reference to marijuana.

He talked to the girls and eventually admitted he smoked the stuff himself, and would be interested in buying some.

Subsequently, he made six buys, paying from 75 cents for one to $1 for three cigarets.

This story ran on page 2, if you can believe that.

Broooooooce!

Bruce Springsteen is touring again, making music with the E Street Band for the first time since 2002. He played last night in his boyhood home town of Asbury Park, NJ before a crowd of 3,000. There's little I could say about Springsteen that (a) you don't already know if you're a fan and (b) could be of any interest to you if you're not. That said, the photo above is of the Asbury Park boardwalk in the Spring of 1976. Returning to Boston from a college radio convention in Philadelphia, the six of us took a little detour so we could pay homage to the guy who once spent his summers "hanging in them dusty arcades, banging them pleasure machines..."

Old Newspapers, Vol. 5

Aug. 11, 1974 editions of the Oakland Tribune carried an interview with motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel, who was three weeks away from jumping 1,765 feet across the Snake River Canyon in Twin Falls, ID.

Why was he doing it? "I'm going to jump it because I said I would, and if a man is a liar he is nothing," Evel said. Evel's wife, Linda, backed him up. "Just think what it would do to him as a man if he backed out. He'd just as soon want to be dead as not go through with it."

I never realized George W. Bush and Evel Knievel had so much in common.

Old Newspapers, Vol. 2

On June 6, 1965,  a Ku Klux Klan parade attracted 500 marchers through downtown Atlanta, according to an Associated Press dispatch in the San Francisco News Call Bulletin. The number swelled to 1,000 once the parade terminated in Hurt Park -- how apt. Or maybe not. The AP said no incidents were reported. Bear in mind this was almost two years after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington.

Old Newspapers, Vol. 1

I've been foraging through some Bay Area daily newspapers from 1963, '64 and '65. Here and there during the summer I'll blog about some of the more interesting nuggets I'm finding.

The Warren Commission decided that the Dallas cops were too deferential to the media, scurrying to fulfill every request and answer every question when they should have been paying more attention to fundamental police work. This, the Commission said, created the environment in which Jack Ruby was able to gain access to the basement of the Dallas police station that fateful Sunday morning. In retrospect, that really was unbelievable, that the media would have been permitted to be so close to an assassination suspect.

Joe Jackson

Feb. 16, 1980, backstage at Boston's Orpheum Theatre. I got paid $25 for the article (for a free monthly music paper called Sweet Potato), and received a pair of free tickets to the concert that night. I had my questions written down on a large index card, which you can see on my lap. I was nervous as hell. To this day Jackson was one of the grumpiest guys I've ever interviewed. He was on tour promoting "I'm the Man," his second album.

The Day Before Katrina

I filed the following column for Forbes.com just as Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The column never ran.

As the storm approached on that fateful Sunday afternoon I sat spellbound before my PC, watching WWL-TV's live video stream. I had hoped my editor would arrive at work Monday morning and post the piece -- which he hadn't assigned -- to document how the city's leading TV news crew handled their jobs in the face of doom.

Alas, he decided not to run it, explaining that the unfolding disaster had already dwarfed anything that might have happened on Sunday. The online news business is like that. Oh well. I'm still proud of this work. Here it is.

* * *

Viewers usually turn to terrestrial TV networks, cable news networks or The Weather Channel when weather disaster strikes. While I did tune my TV to all three of these outlets yesterday, I spent nine fascinating hours on the Internet watching the live video feed from WWL, the CBS-TV (nyse – CBS) affiliate in New Orleans.

Until I finally lost the feed shortly after midnight EDT last night, I learned facts and gained perspective I never would have from a network. I heard from officials familiar with parish evacuation procedures, who weren’t afraid to speak frankly about the impending danger. I saw interviews with elderly evacuees stuck in traffic on clogged exit routes. I also saw candor and poise from the three WWL anchors who provided superb tag-team coverage until forced to evacuate their French Quarter studios late Sunday evening.

Here in diary form is what I saw and learned:

2:30p CDT: Building codes are far better in Gulfport, MS than they were in 1969 when Hurricane Camille hit, said Gulfport mayor Brent Warr.

3:40p CDT: A local TV reporter asked a Department of Homeland Security worker whether evacuees would find “tolerable conditions” inside the Superdome shelter. “I’m not worried about what’s tolerable or intolerable,” he said. “I’m worried about whether you’ll be alive on Tuesday morning.”

4:15p CDT: WWL reporter Dave McNamara reported that many people in Houma, La., south of New Orleans, are choosing to stay on their houseboats to “ride out” the storm.

5p CDT: About 20 percent of the residents of Plaquemines Parish (southeast of New Orleans) chose not to evacuate. An emergency management official said, “We pray for them.” He added that, in a recent computer simulation of a Category 3 hurricane, “there was no dry land in Plaquemines Parish.”

5:15p CDT: A Cleco Power spokesperson, Susan Broussard, said FEMA expects between 250,000 to 750,000 people to be “displaced” from the storm and are planning “for the recovery of bodies.”

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin visited the WWL studios and spilled his guts.

“If you have decided to ride it out, you can expect no fire service or EMS service. You’re on your own... and you can expect 14 hours of being pounded by the storm. I’m expecting lots of water and lots of devastation. I’m expecting to be in full motion with the National Guard, with lots of boats traversing around the streets of New Orleans.

“There will be some casualties,” Nagin warned. “If you’re going to have a 20-foot surge, it’s going to topple the levees. If that happens, parts of the city will be uninhabitable for weeks. It’ll take a week or two to drain the city. The pumps will become inoperable… and it’ll be at least a week or two before they’re back on line.”

“The electricity is going to be a bigger challenge. No electric company has ever faced what we’re about to face. It might be six weeks before electricity is back. This afternoon the sewer system will be flushed. We’re going to release everything out to sea. You’ll still be able to flush your toilets, maybe multiple times. Whether it sustains us for two weeks, we’re not sure. It’s going to be a mess. Most of the cars out there have been topped off with gas and we can expect them to start leaking in the flood waters. I’ve been given a satellite phone in case the cell phones become inoperable.”

5:45p CDT: A WWL reporter asked a citizen why he didn’t evacuate two days ago. “My wife had to work -– so I stayed where she is,” he said.

7:45p CDT: Westwego, La. mayor Robert Billiot says the town’s levee systems were built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, not a 5. He ordered every piece of the city’s fire equipment to be driven 80 miles to the relative safety of Baton Rouge, to be returned when the storm abates.

7:55p CDT: WWL’s McNamara used his cell phone to send still digital photos of shelters in Houma. “People are quiet and scared,” he said. “There aren’t a whole lot of structures around here that can withstand that kind of thing and be inhabitable afterwards.”

8:15p CDT: WWL meteorologist Carl Arredondo, incredibly level-headed throughout his ordeal, predicts “the best case” is a strong category 4.

8:20p CDT: One WWL anchor recalls that at the turn of the century, Galveston, Tex. was considered by many to be one of the new jewels of the South, but it never recovered from the hurricane of 1900. “With tourism and conventions being so important to our economy here in New Orleans, how will we rebound?” he asked. “Those are the questions that occur to you when a Category 5 hurricane is bearing down on you, and you’re worried about your family, and your job, and your building,” he said.

Fox News Channel (nyse – FOX) aired poignant moments, too. Just before 10p CDT it aired a live interview with the pilot of a Hurricane Hunter plane flying through the eye wall. “This is a vicious storm… with tornadic winds,” the pilot crackled. “I feel bad for the people of New Orleans.”

10:30p CDT: The hotels have become “bunkers,” WWL reporter Jonathan Betz said.

Fifteen minutes later, WWL shifted its broadcast operations to makeshift studios in Baton Rouge -– and the live video stream froze shortly after that.