Going, going, gone

For 33 years I called it home.

Now, it's somebody else's home. A family with two young children is moving in.

Closing on my house was two days ago. Today, I got the check.

I might not own a house any more, but I am now the proud owner of a big chunk of cash. That seems fair to me. In fact, considering what I paid for the house in 1980, what I got seems more than fair to me.

Now, if the furnace in the basement stops working when it's 25 degrees outside, it's somebody else's problem.

And when that LBJ bird builds a nest inside the front-porch light fixture, as she did three years in a row, somebody else can clean it out.

People have been asking me if I miss my old house. I miss the good times, but I don't miss the responsibilities of home ownership. I have a great apartment now, and I'm happy as a bug in a rug.

But I might miss that frustrated little bird.

I wish the new owners of my old house well. The house itself, built in 1928, has a great floor plan, good bones and a big back yard. I can picture a swing set under the 30-foot maple tree.

If they're lucky, the new owners will be as happy there as I was. And, perhaps, three decades from now, when their kids are all grown, they can sell it to another couple who are just starting out.

And they can add more memories to a good, solid home.

"It seemed so wrong ..."

It wasn't long before we started playing the "Where were you when ..." game.

It wasn't actually a game. It was therapeutic.

"Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?"

A couple of days ago I sent off an email to a handful of old friends and relatives.

I suppose it's saying something about the age of those in my inner circle that so many were in school.

My niece Terry was still quite young. "I was out on the playground for recess at John B. Cary Elementary School. I was 9 years old and in the 4th grade. The teacher on duty sent me into the school for another kickball. As I walked through the halls, an older student was screaming 'The President has been shot! President Kennedy has been shot!' I forgot all about that kickball ... and ran immediately back out to the teacher and told her what I heard.... She rounded up all the students and escorted us back inside the school where we spent the rest of the day watching the newscasts on TV, some of us in awe and some of us scared and crying."

Terry wasn't alone. There were grownups, too, who were scared and crying.

Terry's brother, Mike, was older. He had stayed home that Friday morning because he was sick, and his grandfather took him to the doctor's office. "We had finished at the doctor's and were going by the drugstore to pick up a prescription when we heard on the car radio that JFK had been shot." Mike was 12 years old.

My friend Walter, an Army brat, was a sophomore in high school in Atlanta. He was about to go to the auditorium for an assembly to mark the end of Democracy Week -- "I have no memory of what exactly that was about," he wrote me -- when the principal put a radio station on the PA system.

"We went to the assembly; I remember nothing of it at all, as I'll wager is true for most of the other students. At the end of the program Sister Mary Whatever, the principal, announced that he had died. We were led in a prayer or two and walked numbly back to get our coats and begin the long trip home (two city buses and about an hour).

"Downtown Atlanta was spooky, weird and quiet. Once I got home I sat, like most Americans, in front of the TV for four days."

My friend John David, with whom I worked at AFTV in Germany in the late 1960s, still stays in touch via email. We haven't seen each other since December 1969. Like Walter, he was a sophomore in high school in 1963.

"Came over the P.A. Teacher was pretty bummed. I was too young to understand the severity of this, but soon after we were all dismissed. I recall my mom and dad were not happy, but no real mourning -- we (I guess I was formative) were GOP voters, ex military dad, college grad mom. I doubt they voted for the man, and I remember being sort of bummed out with the 24x7 wall-to-wall media for a whole week."

Chuck Minx also worked with me in Germany. He taught me most of what I know about photography. I haven't seen him either since coming home, but we stay in touch. He wrote me from his home in California.

"I was in my dorm room in college and heard shouting downstairs. I found my dorm-mates in agitation in front of the TV. We as a nation used to think that this kind of thing only happened in other countries. Afterwards, we had to face the fact that we were no more stable or less volatile than anywhere else."

My friend Jill, who grew up to be a newspaper reporter and a free-lance writer and editor, was 17. She was a high school senior in Fort Meyers, Fla.

"I was ... coming out of my 5th period Spanish class and encountered my friend Marcia who told me that President Kennedy had been shot. She had been in the high school's administration office and heard the report on the radio. I headed for my next class, physical education. In the girls' locker room, I heard the announcement from the high school's principal that the President was dead. I felt numb."

As did so many of us.

"I had just been to the cinema with my father in the West End of London," wrote my most far-flung correspondent, Christine, who is now an author and indexer. She was a grownup whose memories went back to the Blitz. I thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of somebody who was not American.

"We'd been to see a Garbo film, I can't remember which one. As we were about to descend into the underground station -- I think it was Leicester Square -- we saw a newspaper [display] which announced that President Kennedy had been shot dead. Again, I don't remember the exact wording. My father and I looked at each other in shock and disbelief. Neither of us could speak."

Christine was for all the world like an American in what she was feeling and thinking 50 years ago.

"Kennedy was an unbelievably charismatic figure, the youngest US president to have been elected to office.... He seemed to emanate confidence, optimism, vigour and intelligence," she wrote. "Quite apart from politics, the Kennedys made a strikingly glamorous couple. It seemed so wrong that JFK should have been cut down at such a young age, when he still seemed to have so much to offer. We grieved for Jackie, who was by his side when he was shot. No wife should have to see her husband die in such a horrifying way."

For the record, I was in the announce booth at WTVR TV recording promotional station breaks for that night's prime time. They would never be heard on-air.

Fifty years ago we clung to each other for support. This year, we don't cling. But we do share. We survived. And we have never forgotten that day.

Remembering Topper, Trigger and Champion

I learned to love shoot-'em-ups -- what my father used to call "horse operas" -- at the East End Theater on 25th Street on Church Hill.

I read the other day that they're going to fix up the now-decrepit old building and turn it into an apartment house. Junk trees are growing from where we used to sit in the dark and root for the guys in the white hats. Graffiti is all over the walls and the roof is a mess.

Hopalong Cassidy wouldn't care.

Neither would Roy Rogers or Gene Autry.

But I do. I'm delighted to hear that the building will live again, even if it's not as a magical portal to the land of the cowboys.

The old Art Deco theater first opened its doors in 1938. It was probably no more than a dozen years later that I took to riding my bike from 24th Street to the East End Theater for Saturday morning cowboy movies. I'd leave my bike outside on the sidewalk with all the other kids' bikes.

Yes, it was safe to do that 60 years ago. When the movie ended, my bike was always right where I left it.

On Saturday afternoons, we'd go back home and play cowboys and Indians in somebody's back yard with our cap pistols ablaze. As boys will, we specialized in over-the-top death scenes when one of us got "shot."

Cowboys were a big deal then. Was there a house in my neighborhood without a picture of a kid in the family in a cowboy suit and cowboy hat riding a pony at that "pony farm" on Cary Street?

(I think it cost a quarter to ride one of those ponies and then pose for a picture. Just for perspective, you could buy a six-pack of Cokes for a quarter in those days.)

And Hopalong Cassidy, who wore a black hat -- he was the exception among the good-guys -- and his horse, Topper, fed right into our adolescent fantasies. So did the singing cowboys, Roy Rogers (horse: Trigger) and Gene Autry (horse: Champion).

And that's what they were: fantasies. The West was never like that, and real cowboys didn't pour out their pent-up emotions by singing songs around the campfire.

But those fantasies set our imaginations on fire.

Sometimes there would be a drawing at those Saturday morning cowboy movies for a shiny new bike. I was never a winner, but I once knew a guy who knew a guy ...

So I am glad that the East End Theater will live on.

So will my happy memories of sitting in the dark watching cowboy movies with my friends on Saturday mornings.

Not a clue

Kids say the darndest things.

So, sometimes, do local TV reporters.

Who, come to think of it, are often kids.

"Kids Say the Darndest Things" was the most popular segment of "Art Linkletter's House Party," which started up when I was about 10 years old. It ran every weekday afternoon on CBS TV beginning on Sept. 1, 1952. It ended up as TV's longest-running daytime variety show by the time the plug was pulled in 1969.

Linkletter would interview kids and sometimes get extremely funny -- and sometimes embarrassingly frank -- answers.

Often, the kids didn't have a clue about why the audience was laughing.

I compare some local TV reporters to kids because TV reporters in Richmond are often quite young. Richmond is just shy of being in the Top 50 TV markets in the country. Richmond is where aspiring TV reporters often come to find their first or second TV job. They hope they're on the way up, and they hope that Richmond is where they can build a résumé.

They're easy to spot. Just last week I heard novice reporters from two different stations reporting live when they didn't even know exactly where they were. One said he was on Hanover Street in Richmond's Fan District and the other said she was on Forest Hill Road.

(If they had looked at the street signs they would have known that both Forest Hill and Hanover are Avenues.)

But no matter. "Look, Mom, I'm on TV."

A couple of mornings ago, another newbie reported live from Northside that police had responded to a convenience store robbery. "They got called over here for an attempted robbery attempt."

I can't even get my mind around how somebody could attempt an attempted robbery.

The funniest moment by far recently came this past week in a local report that aired on one of Richmond's major evening newscasts. It was about a stabbing that happened during a video telephone chat.

The young reporter said the victim was "a 9-month old pregnant woman."

Close, but laughably impossible. The fact is that the victim was a grown woman who was 9 months pregnant.

The big problem for local TV news is that when these things happen, credibility flies out the window.

Kids. And local TV reporters.

Sometimes they say the darndest things.

The passing of the torch

I was working on the day that the last of America’s naivete was stripped away.

I spent most of the day behind a microphone -- at WTVR TV, WMBG AM and WCOD FM -- on that Friday in late November when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was still working my way through college at the University of Richmond.

Everybody on duty at the stations’ studios under the tower on West Broad Street was pressed into service for the next four days.

I got a break on Sunday, and a group of my fraternity brothers and I decided to drive up to D.C. that morning for the lying in state at the Capitol. By the time we got there, thousands of people were in a line that stretched for blocks and blocks.

As we inched forward, word came from a transistor radio that Ruby had shot Oswald in Dallas. You could see the news flash ripple through the line like a stadium wave.

It grew dark, and we gave up. We never made it to the Capitol building.

I was back at work Monday when the non-stop broadcast coverage turned its focus to the funeral. Later, we all watched on the monitors in the WTVR control room as JFK was buried at Arlington.

It would be 45 years before I visited the Kennedy grave site in person.

What stuck with me from that visit was not the eternal flame but the inscriptions from JFK’s inaugural address that are carved into a low stone wall surrounding the site. I had watched that inaugural address on TV at the student commons at U.R. But I had forgotten much of the speech, which promised hope and unity and seemed to draw the nation together as a whole.

Here are a few excerpts from that speech from a new, young president who had inspired such optimism and high expectations for so many in my generation.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage -- and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge -- and more….

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah -- to "undo the heavy burdens ... and to let the oppressed go free."

And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin….

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it -- and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

I was one of those listening to the new president’s summons on January 20, 1961.

And I believed.