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Author: Kelcey Caulder
Athens answers national gentrification crisis with opportunity
Who Makes Athens: Mentoring through community and consistency
‘Pauldoe’ transformed into Columbia Brookside
Outline
Part One: Indiana, The End
- Lede, scene setting
- Establishes that the family is involved with the death process (coroners) and that Don Jr. would rather not continue this legacy
- He digs in the ground
- Digs, sets up the plywood and takes dirt to far side of the cemetery — hints that funeral might be special as he behaves differently than normal
- Soldiers come to the funeral, it is clear he knows them, they set up, also gives time stamp (May 2007)
- Talks about the route taken by the hearse
- Hearse arrives; discusses the procession
- Soldiers take out casket; it is made for soldiers who died in Iraq and depicts scenes from the war. Also talks about people filing in.
- More about the funeral ritual — “Amazing Grace” plays, a song by Nine Inch Nails (the dead clearly liked the band), and soldiers are signaled
- Soldiers fire honorary shots
- Leatherbee prepares to play
- Leatherbee plays, discusses bugle playing
- Leatherbee quote
- Soldiers return to fold flag; quote about how difficult that is, particularly for young families
- Dawson (soldier) talks about how he knew the family would remember the flag folding later
- Puts shells inside flag
- Presents flag to family
- Brigadier General used to explain process of getting military officials to attend military funerals & discussion about her always remembering the faces of funeral attendees
- Talks about comforting the wife of the dead soldier, Missie
- Presents, on knees, the flag to Missie
- Talks about how they try to relate to the families of dead soldiers
- The myth of folding the flag
- Quote said during flag presentation
- Mourners leave funeral
- Placing of the temporary headstone
- Name of soldier → Sgt. Joe Montgomery
- Gail Bond remembers Joe’s life (Gail is his mother)
- Gail’s reliance on smoking is described — she uses this for stress and negative events keep her from quitting
- Description of those events
- Talks about strangers attending the funeral because he was the first soldier from that town to die in Iraq
- Talks about how the people at the funeral couldn’t have known details about him — growing up in poverty, wanting more for his kids, being ashamed of his jobs, etc.
- Escort from airport to the funeral home
- More about the process of getting him to the funeral home
- Gail worries about the funeral being picketed
- Dunaway, a paratrooper, says he thinks it is an honor to escort the casket
- Talks about driving by and seeing people react
- Joey previously worked at a steel forge
- Joey’s best friend was Ryan Heacock — he was to be his best man at his wedding
- How Joey & Ryan became friends in high school
- Ryan set Joey up with Missie
- Ryan used to sell Joey his paintings and Missie has a collection
- Ryan designed Joey’s tombstone
- Interstate, mourners.
- Quote about family being honored and it meaning a lot to them
- Joey was homeless for a year when his parents kicked him out
- He went to Florida to live with his sister
- Ryan brings Joey home and Gail says he must work on his problems if he’s going to move back in
- He agrees and comes home. He dates Missie again
- He fails to make ends meet and joins the Army as an alternative way to care for his family
- Things smoothed out in their lives
- Gail reflects on the last time she saw Joey alive at Christmas in 2006
- Joey comes home again, but in his casket
- Opening the casket
- Viewing the body
- Micah gives Joey his Mason’s ring and the hand curls in on itself; Gail cries
- Jim Staggers is introduced
- Describes “honorable transfer”
- Talks about how Staggers came to this profession
- Staggers reflects on what it would be like if he had been the one to die
- Talks about how pallbearers can tell certain things about the bodies of the people in caskets based on weight
- Joey’s casket is too light but they don’t react to this outwardly
- Finding ways to keep their “game faces”
- Pallbearers withdraw
- Reading from Psalms 46
- Missie sobs
- Gail comforts children
- Staggers cries
- Honor guard carries casket to the back of the hearse
- The state troopers talk about how to do ‘better next time’
- Two people in the van will go to Iraq also
Part 2: Dover Air Force Base
- Steve Greene gets a call from the Pentagon and makes plans with the Air Force
- Description of how deceased soldiers were transported
- They Holleys campaign to change how the Army handles deaths
- Kalitta had already been stationed
- Greene asks Kalitta if could handle all the flights of deceased soldiers the same as Tucker and Manchaca
- Crew is randomly assigned out of Kalitta’s ranks
- Jones and Linton have flown the same route many times
- Reveals that Jones and Linton helped fly Joey home to Seymour
- They talk about how more people tend to show up in smaller towns
- Discussion about parents not attending funerals
- 85 hours of flying in a two-week stretch
- Checking of paperwork
- Pushing the casket off of the ball mat and onto the lift
- Steve Green says he’ll always remember Seymour
- Major Cory Larsen introduced
- Larsen worked at the Port Mortuary at the Dover Air Force Base
- He is protective of co-workers
- Karen Giles worked in the mortuary as well
- Description of the building
- Karen is the person who prepared Joey to return to Seymour
- Process of cleaning the body
- Talk about other areas of the building, including a counseling and meditation section
- David Sparks talks about people in the atrium; he has been there since just after 9/11
- Arrival of Joey
- Description of how to perform an autopsy
- Specifics of Joey’s autopsy
- Wounds are recorded.
- The body is further prepared
- Talks about ‘viewability’ as a way of giving to the family
- Morticians talk about putting soldiers back together
- Description of cleaning a dead man’s hair
- Placing the body in the casket
- Cremation preparation
- Placement of the flag is the last step of the process
- Introduction of Major General Richard P. Formica
- Description of Formica’s duties in the death/burial process of soldiers
- Formica was there when Joey came in
- Chaplin Sparks tells a story about the Bible
- K-Loader enters the platform
- Honor guard marches
- Honor guard handles one case at a time
- Sparks gives a speech and says a prayer.
- Sparks believes this is the most important work he can do
- Formica gets emotional
- Port Mortuary takes the cases
Part 3: Forward Operating Base Falcon
- Sgt. Terry Slaght was Joey’s friend and arranged his angel flight
- Talk about how Slaght realized it was his friend
- Regrets of Slaght
- Arrival at the Baghdad airport
- Getting Joey in the truck
- Transporting Joey’s body to the base
- Description of how Gail found out about Joey’s death, how Missie found out, etc.
- Review of what happened on the mission that Joey was on when he died; talks about music, emailing Missie, etc.
- Description of “house duty”
- Joey’s squad went first
- Joey is teased, but respected by the men who follow him into battle
- Joey is blown up in an explosion, eyewitness comments and quotes
- They can’t find Joey, then find his rifle
- Later they find his body and know immediately he was dead
- The team carries him out, though they couldn’t find all of his body
- Platoon talks about their shock and how surprised they were that Ross was okay
- Talk about taking care of his body and making sure to get all of his stuff to send back
- The platoon mourns
- Seeing Joey for the last time as platoon members on May 23.
Ledes — “The Mind-Bending Benedict Cumberbatch”
“When Benedict Cumberbatch was 19 years old, he got good and lost in the Himalayas. No longer a schoolboy in tailcoat and boater, not yet the internationally known star of Sherlock and one of the world’s most unlikely sex symbols, he had taken a gap year before university to get a glimpse of life beyond A-level exams and Sunday chapel.”
This is an example of a anecdotal lede. It continues on for a while, telling the story of a young Benedict Cumberbatch teaching English to Tibetan monks and getting lost in the mountains near Kathmandu. This lede really drew me into the story for several reasons — one, I am a huge fan of Cumberbatch and had never heard the story they were sharing and, two, because it showed me that he was a bit of a thrill seeker, something I wouldn’t have known or expected. So, it told me something new about him and it shared something about his personality that I didn’t know before. I think that makes it a pretty great lede for a profile story. It does demand that I listen to it, just as Edward Murrow instructed Nancy Dickerson a lede should.
The Hamilton Cult
I read The Hamilton Cult. I particularly enjoyed this essay for two reasons — one, I am a proud (if occasionally wary) member of the Hamilton Cult, and, two, I adore history. I am currently finishing up my minor in history at the University of Georgia and found that this piece addressed many of the qualms that I have with the musical, despite my love of it. Robert Sullivan, the author, discusses Hamilton from the perspective of someone who understands history. He questions whether or not the Alexander Hamilton in Lin Manuel Miranda’s production is a full enough version of the actual man — and clearly decides that the answer is no. He speaks with historian William Hogeland who complains about the musical’s lack of attention to the Whiskey Rebellion and the too-intense focus on romantic entanglements. He does, however, also admit that the theatrical piece is meant to make consumers fall in love with the “$10 Founding Father without a father.” From here, he jumps into a larger discussion about other ways that Hamilton has been portrayed over the years, asking readers to question which version of his history we are seeing and why we are seeing it now.
Voices:
Robert Sullivan, the author of the piece. It’s always important to consider who is writing and why.
William Hogeland, a historian who has written extensively about Hamilton and is bothered by the lack of accuracy of the musical.
The Rockefeller Foundation, funds trips for high school students from low socioeconomic backgrounds to see Hamilton on Broadway.
An unnamed high school teacher who talks about his class and his thoughts on the play.
Lastly, I’d say that Hamilton’s voice was carried throughout, simply because of the emphasis on his history and writings. Hogeland uses these things as a way of giving Hamilton, the man, the chance to speak out across time against Hamilton the musical.
Interview Postmortem
As some of our other classmates have noted happened in their experience, I also began engaging in postmortem analysis of my interview with Samantha immediately following the recording session. We discussed together what we thought our strengths and weaknesses were as interviewers, as well as the woes of outside noise. We recorded inside the conference room at The Red & Black and found that every car that passed and, in particular, every motorcycle that passed made a ton of outside noises that were ridiculously loud. Thankfully, we realized this early on and discovered a solution — we would pause immediately upon hearing an engine approaching or would repeat comments if necessary.
During the editing process, I noticed that I used a lot of confirming sounds like “uh-huh” and “yes” that were very distracting and that couldn’t be removed from my final product because they were in the middle or at the tail end of sentences, followed quickly by the continuation of what I had been listening to. In the future, I will be more mindful of this during interviews. Another thing that I noticed, thanks in part to a very helpful comment from our professor, is that my voice is a bit childish. I’ve been working on recording myself speaking in a lower tone, playing around with the way I speak to hopefully come up with a more natural sounding, adult voice.
In terms of questions that I wished I had asked, I wished that I had known ahead of time what Samantha was most passionate about. I didn’t give myself a lot of time to prepare for the conversation. In some ways, that made it more natural. In others, it limited my ability to ask deeper questions about radio, as it isn’t a medium that I’ve worked in extensively. I also wish that I had asked Samantha more about why she seems to prefer college radio over talk radio and differences set those two apart in her mind.
Audio Profile of Samantha Piper
Here is my interview with Samantha!
NPR Politics: Monday Mail (Early Edition)
I chose to listen to the NPR Politics Podcast, mostly because it is a podcast that I listen to regularly and very much enjoy. I think they have a good mix of humor and knowledge that help to make the topics they discuss interesting without veering into John Oliver (though I love him) and Stephen Colbert territory. For this post specifically, I chose the Monday Mail episode from September 5. I picked this because it was one that I knew talked about some interesting topics — Trump on Birtherism, Hillary Clinton and building a resume because of her gender, John Oliver (this is a theme) and the really, really fascinating Ohio Senate race (seriously, if you’re into politics, read up on it), among other things. I feel like it gives a good feel of what the show is about and what kind of content they like to showcase for people who may not be familiar with it. Other than content, there are a few other things that I really like about this podcast (and all NPR podcasts that I’ve come across, really). Quality. Everything is quality, from the musical intro to the sound throughout the podcast to the questions selected to be put on air. They just produce great content.
Segments: An early edition of Monday Mail
Voice Overs: Campaign Reporter/Host Sam Sanders, Congressional Correspondent Susan Davis, Political Editor Domenico Montanaro, and recordings from listeners.