Remembering Charlie Sullivan

Jan. 16, 2012

          When the nights and days are cold and Canada geese yodel to me from up high, it’s not uncommon for my thoughts to turn to my friend, Charlie Sullivan.

          This fall and winter didn’t have much cold weather and instead of thousands of Canada geese in Ballard County as in years gone by, we may have a few hundred migrate through. Milder winters and plenty of food north of us have reduced our Canada goose population. There are plenty of snow geese and specks, sometimes thousands of them flying over at a time, but their calls do not resonate with the primeval psyche as do the calls of the Canada geese.

          And it is the haunting call of the Canada geese that causes me to sit quietly and think about Charlie Sullivan.

          When it came to calling Canada geese into a hunter’s spread of decoys, Charlie was as good as they get. He called by mouth, not with any mechanical call, and he sounded like geese sitting on the ground, trying to seduce the ones in the air. Not only did he sound like geese, he practically became a goose, with his mind attuned to the mind of that bird.

          Hunters at the clubs around Horseshoe Lake in Southern Illinois paid Charlie to call for them. Later, hunters at Crab Orchard Lake did the same after Charlie moved to Williamson County.

          Charlie was one of those energetic, happy lovers of life who should live and smile forever, yet didn’t even make it into old age. He fought multiple sclerosis for a long time, but in the end it won, and Charlie left us in 2005. He was born in 1942.

          In addition to hunting, Charlie liked music. He played in some bands around Cairo, including the popular Mods.

          I met Charlie and became his friend during my days as a reporter and editor at the Cairo Evening Citizen. I did a lot of outdoor writing in those days, and outdoors is where you would find Charlie, except during those times of drudgery when he was between hunting seasons and had to work for his father, who was an electrical contractor.

          When I was away serving in the military, or after I moved to Tennessee, I would write to Charlie every fall when the cold weather started biting in the evenings.

          I believe the year was 1978, but it could have been 1979, and I was living at the Clinch River Kennels owned by my friend Dr. Larry Dry, just outside Oak Ridge. I was in law school and Larry let me live in a mobile home on a little hill looking down at the kennel.

          It was almost time for the Knoxville, Tenn., chapter of Ducks Unlimited to hold its annual dinner. I asked Larry if he would be interested in bringing Charlie to that dinner to give a demonstration of duck and goose calling. Charlie had been Illinois state champion in both calling events. He was also the national coon calling champion.

          Larry agreed and Charlie came down a day before the event. I invited Lee White and Bobby McGee, two friends from law school, to come over that evening. Charlie and I each had a guitar, and there was an ample supply of liquor.

          I had my tape recorder going that night and taped some of the worst singing but best fun four guys could ever have. Because of the alcohol, it sounded good while we were doing it. Listening to the tape later, it wasn’t so good.

          I also taped the calling demonstration at Knoxville the next night on the other side of the tape.

          I still have that tape. I was in one of those Charlie nostalgia moods the other day, so I listened to it driving to Paducah and back. Great memories but bittersweet for a couple of reasons.

          One of the calling demonstrations Charlie gave required several calls at once. Three duck calls were held in a harmonica holder around his neck. One was mounted on a foot bellows, and he had two shaker calls in each hand.

He sounded like a flock of ducks. The audience gave him a standing ovation.

          He used that multi-call technique in the fall of 1975 while I was in the Navy at Guantanamo Bay, and won the Illinois state duck calling contest with it. That qualified him to go to the nationals at Stuttgart, Ark.

          The man who finished second in the Illinois contest contacted officials at Stuttgart and told them about Charlie. They redid the rules and limited each contestant to the use of only one call.

          Sports Illustrated did an article about it. You can find the article at this link and I highly recommend it: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1091162/1/index.htm

          Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Charlie the last couple of days. I miss you, buddy.

All writers need good editors

Jan. 15, 2012

          From time to time I’ll run across a sentence in a news story and copy it into a file on my computer. This particular file contains sentences that look okay at first glance, but they don’t say what the reporter intended to say. The writer needed a good copy editor, but didn’t have one. For instance, I’ve seen many articles where someone is bragging about an athlete or a politician or a good guy of some sort, and the speaker says, “His value cannot be understated.” The word the speaker wanted is “overstated.”

          I’ll share a few today, but first I’ll confess that I’ve certainly done the same sort of thing that I’m putting into this account.

          Quite a few of these sentences include unnecessary or misplaced “weasel words,” those words – such as “allegedly” – that reporters use to discourage libel suits.

          Here’s one from Feb. 5, 2010, in an online article that quotes People magazine. The article is about a report that actress Brittany Murphy’s death was accidental.

          “ ‘This death could've been preventable,’ Assistant Chief Ed Winter says, People reports.”

          That’s not accurate. Either the death was preventable or it wasn’t. What the chief meant to say was that the death could have been prevented.

          I don’t know where this next one came from because I didn’t copy that information. It probably appeared in 2010 and I think it may have been in the Knoxville (Tennessee) News-Sentinel or in The Oak Ridger, the paper in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

          A chief deputy said that a man was shot by his 82-year-old grandfather. The grandfather’s last name was Duncan. Here’s the sentence: “Duncan was a former Sheriff's Department jailer in the 1980s.”

          I think the writer meant that Duncan was a jailer in the ’80s but is no longer a jailer. Writing that he “was a former Sheriff’s Department jailer in the 1980s” implies that he is no longer a former one. Writing about his status now, it would be accurate to say that he is a former jailer.

          Here’s a sentence from an Associated Press article I saw on Dec. 19, 2010:

          “A central Illinois woman was hospitalized after authorities say her 14-year-old son shot her in the chest after an argument.”

          I don’t think they should have waited to hospitalize her until after authorities said she was shot. What the sentence is trying to say is, “A central Illinois woman was hospitalized after her 14-year-old son shot her in the chest after an argument, authorities say.”

          This isn’t from a news story. It was on an envelope from Kentucky Farm Bureau. The envelope contained my car insurance statement: “Your only bill is enclosed.” Wow! Don’t I wish that were true.

          Here’s one from an online column on AOL. I didn’t note the date: “As my husband and I poured over our new budget the other night, it became clear: A housekeeper may no longer be in the cards.”

          It sounds messy, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t say what she poured over the budget. The correct word there is “pored.”

          Here’s one I see and hear often in weather reports, and while it is technically not accurate, I believe, I probably should overlook it because there is no confusion as to meaning and I say it myself: “Temperatures are getting warmer.” No. Temperature is a scale that shows the level of something’s warmth or cold. Ice is 32 degrees. The ice is cold. The measured temperature just shows how cold.

          From the Knoxville News-Sentinel, July 10, 2011:

          “A man is dead and authorities say he was allegedly killed by his brother tonight.”

          I covered lots of police matters during my newspaper years and I don’t think I ever saw or heard a policeman say that someone was allegedly killed. If an officer should say that, he would be saying he doesn’t know if the victim is dead. What this writer meant was, “A man is dead and authorities allege that he was killed by his brother tonight.”

          Here’s one from The Oak Ridger, Dec. 21, 2011, that shows excessive caution about a reported incident:

          “Oak Ridge Police Chief Jim Akagi has declined to comment on an alleged investigation into an incident in Knoxville last Thursday that involved two of his officers. According to information the alleged victim told a Knoxville reporter, two Oak Ridge police officers became involved with him in a road rage incident outside of a Waffle House on Weisgarber Road in Knoxville. Knoxville police were called to the scene and Darrell DeBusk, the Police Department's spokesman, said the department is still investigating the alleged incident and are interviewing witnesses.”

          Coming back closer to home, the Paducah Sun reported on Jan 2, 2012:

          “Though technically Aldi beat his twin brother Vodra by one minute into the new year, the first local babies born in 2012 are benefiting from the advances in neonatal care at one local hospital.”

          My complaint about that sentence is that the second part doesn’t relate to the first part at all. What does beating a twin by a minute have to do with benefiting from neonatal care?

          In today’s Paducah Sun there’s a story about a man having surgery for a hematoma after a fight at a local bar. Here’s the offending sentence:

          “Paducah police Detective Brian Laird said that both men were acquaintances.”

          I guess he means they were acquaintances of each other, but if that’s the case, the word “both” just confuses the matter. To me, “both” in that sentence implies that they were acquaintances of some unnamed person: “Both men were acquaintances of another man who passed out on the floor.”

          And finally, here’s something I saw on AOL in the last day or two. This isn’t a misplaced word or an overly cautious use of weasel words. This is ignorance. It’s a case where someone is trying to use a word that she doesn’t know the meaning of. The article is about celebrities with children who have big age gaps. Maybe one child is two years old and the other is 15:

          “Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker may have made her name as the penultimate single girl, but ….”

          I suspect that the writer decided that “ultimate single girl” wasn’t ultimate enough, so why not make it even ultimater.

          Unfortunately, “penultimate” doesn’t mean that something is even more ultimate. It means that it’s next to last, as in, “this is the penultimate paragraph in this story.” So the writer was describing Ms. Parker as the next-to-last single girl.”

          When in doubt, use a dictionary. And be in doubt much more often.

Area basketball nostalgia including

the1955 Bardwell-Paducah regional game

December 23, 2011

          Any time longtime, serious West Kentucky basketball fans run out some clock while nursing a cold beer and talking about basketball players, teams and games that have attained mythological stature, even though the stories are true, it is necessary that certain stories be included if the bull session is to have any credibility at all.

          There’s the 1952 Cuba Cubs, the little school that won the state championship. Legend has it that the coach showed them films of the Harlem Globetrotters. Howie Crittenden became a noted dribbler akin to Marques Haynes of the Globetrotters, and Charles “Doodle” Floyd developed a hook shot akin to the one that Goose Tatum used for the ’Trotters. Cuba was runner-up in 1951 and then won the title in 1952 by beating powerful Louisville Manual.

          Someone who deserves to be in the stories is the late “Jumping” Joe Fulks of Marshall County. He played for Murray state for a couple of years before he went into the Marines. He played in the NBA for the Philadelphia Warriors and later other teams. Fulks scored 63 points in a game on Feb. 10, 1949, a single-game record that stood for more than 10 years before it was broken by Elgin Baylor.

          They probably should talk about the 1959 North Marshall Jets team that won the state championship with a cast of good players that included Pat Doyle, who went from high school to play for Adolph Rupp and the University of Kentucky.

          And speaking of Rupp, you have to talk about Wickliffe’s own Kenneth Rollins who was captain of the Kentucky Fabulous Five, which won the 1948 NCAA tournament and then won the gold medal in the Olympics.

          And don’t forget Kenneth’s younger brother, Phil, who went from Wickliffe High School to Louisvile and was on the team that won the NIT in 1956. Phil and Kenneth both played in the NBA.

          In a nostalgic moment in 1976 when I was working in sports at the Paducah Sun-Democrat, the phone rang one night and the caller was Charles Floyd, having a nostalgic moment perhaps fueled by a drop or two of alcohol. He wanted to know if I knew how to get in touch with Phil Rollins. I gave him the telephone number of Phil’s parents in Wickliffe. I don’t know if he called them. Floyd said Phil Rollins was the best high school player he ever saw.

          And then there was the 1955 Regional Tournament game between Paducah Tilghman and Bardwell, played at Murray, still remembered primarily for its lack of scoring.

          One of the central figures in that game was Bobby Hoskins, Bardwell’s ace dribbler.

          My uncle Billy Bob Crice and I ran into Hoskins today at Ryan’s in Paducah. He’s several years older, of course, but still looks trim and conditioned enough to hold his own in a game, at least for a while.

          We talked with Hoskins about that storied game in the tournament. Billy Bob was in the crowd that night, having been just very recently sent home from Korea, where he served in the Army while also serving in absentia as Ballard County sheriff.

          Paducah Tilghman was heavily favored. In fact, Tilghman had beaten Bardwell by 22 points just a week or two earlier.

          Tilghman was under the direction of veteran coach Otis Dinning. Tom Mix Adkins was the first-year coach of Bardwell. Adkins eventually finished out his high school coaching career at Joppa High School in Illinois.

          Knowing that his team couldn’t compete with Tilghman in a regular type of game, Adkins decided that they would eat a lot of clock by holding the ball, which we called “freezing” the ball back in the days when it was possible.

          That was Hoskins’ responsibility. He was a noted ball handler. According to Billy Bob, “They couldn’t take the ball away from Hoskins when he was dribbling.”

          There was no shot clock in those days, so Bardwell just held the ball most of the time, letting Hoskins dribble away the clock.

          Tilghman had a lead, so Dinning told his players just to back off and let Bardwell hold it.

          Late in the fourth quarter, Bardwell had the ball and Tilghman had a 5-4 lead. With seconds remaining, Adkins called a time out.

          “Bobby,” he told Hoskins, “we’re behind and only seconds are left. You’ve got to try to score.”

          With three seconds left, Hoskins drove the baseline and put up a shot from about eight feet out. A Tilghman defender, going for the block, was called for a foul.

          Hoskins made both free throws and Bardwell upset the highly favored Tilghman team 6-5 in a game of freeze-the-ball that you’ll never see again.