The Virginia Press Association (VPA) asked me to be the keynote speaker at their annual conference and awards banquet, held May 4 at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, VA. This year’s theme was “Beyond the Fold (Navigating Tomorrow’s News Landscape).”The association was founded in 1881 by the Virginia General Assembly. Current VPA Executive Director Betsy Edwards liked the hopeful tones of my book “Beacons in the Darkness (Hope and Transformation Among America’s Community Newspapers).”
By request here is a lightly edited version of my 40-minute talk. Post-conference updates are denoted by ***. Enjoy.
No place is a place until things are [...]
The author at Dark Angel Towing 1/24/24. (Portrait by Nick Kam.)
I’ve spent a lot of time on America’s highways.
There was a 1991 Chicago to Santa Monica, CA. trip on Route 66. There have been a few memorable jaunts from Chicago through Memphis and Natchez, MS. to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, including getting caught in a tornado near Kingsland, AR. The Mississippi River Road. I’ve put 68,000 miles on my 2015 Ford Transit camper van featuring excursions that I turned into a book. I’ve never had a roadside calamity.
Until now.
And where did it happen?
On the Eisenhower Expressway [...]
Sanford Cohen at the Homewood, circa 1981. (Photo by Tom Cruze; Suburban Sun-Times.)
I’ve been writing about people for more than 40 years. It has been a cinematic parade of characters, misfits, rogues, and dreamers. Some memories are starting to fade away into a winter horizon. Other figures remain for years, bringing common warmth to a random thought.
Sanford Cohen was one of those subjects.
From 1977 until 1984 Cohen was the effervescent owner of the Homewood Theatre, 18110 S. Dixie Highway in Homewood, south of Chicago. He was larger than life itself, to coin a Roger Ebert documentary. I met him in the [...]
“Doubles on Ice is a previously unheard Lou Whitney composition and I always wanted to use the image of a figure skater in a celebration of Lou.
A couple of years ago recording engineer Eric Schuchmann was doodling around The Studio, the beloved recording space on the outskirts of Springfield, Mo. He stumbled across a DAT tape marked “publishing demos 98-99.” Schuchmann had been long-time right-hand man for the brilliant bandleader-bassist-singer-producer Lou Whitney.
Whitney was also the spiritual force behind the great American rock n’ soul bands The Skeletons, The Morells, and the seminal [...]
