About that time I almost killed a man…with a pointed question
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 11
Time for some action, just a fraction of friction
I got the clearance to run the interference
Into your satellite, shinin' a battle light
Swing out the gat, and I know that will gat ya right
Here's an example, just a little sample
How I could just kill a man
The Sunday Reader, June 23, 2024
Editor’s Note: For years I’ve joked that my autobiography was entitled Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things. Perhaps the joke is on me; “About that time I got banned from the Pacific Rim” turned out to be the most popular issue of Perfecting Equilibrium. The reader is always right! So…more chapters of Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things. I hope you enjoy them just as much! Also, it is Just Too Hot for serious discussion, Schools Out For Summer, and Everybody Is On Vacation. So lighter stuff during these dog days.
“I thought you killed him,” Dave said as we walked out to the car. “You thought I INTERVIEWED him to death?!?” I said. But then I admitted “Actually it terrified me, too.”
The Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things have a tendency to cascade. I decided in 8th grade that wanted to be a writer, like Earnest Hemingway, write The Young Man And The Sea or some such. I’d refined that to playwright by the time I was in college, then dropped out junior year when I got a job writing for a newspaper. Why pay to learn to be writer, when I could be a writer and get paid? Isn’t that how Twain and Hemingway and a bunch of others got started?
I was a theater major in college, working on playwriting and directing. In both I was fascinated by a technique called mise-en-scene, where actors were posed like a painting framed by the proscenium arch.
On my first day as a cub reporter my editor handed me a camera and said “Reporters take photos for their stories.” And just like that I was a photojournalist. I looked through the viewfinder, and was swept away; a camera was a little electromechanical machine for creating mise-en-scenes.
So I started taking photos! But I was...not bad. I was TERRIBLE. All of my photos were Important People Grinning and Gripping the Large Check/Trophy/Prize. Nobody at the paper was really any better, so I started raiding the library, and was fortunate enough to come across Ansel Adams’ books, which I devoured.
By the time I got to Pacific Stars & Stripes I was good enough that the editors had me doing stints in the photolab when they were short photographers. When I got to the Waterbury Republican-American after leaving Stripes and the US Army the editors used me interchangeably. Having a staff photographer they didn’t need to share with other departments gave them great flexibility while trying to cover the entire Northwest Corner of Connecticut.
So it was Just Another Day when Dave Carr asked me to grab some photos for one of his stories. Dave and I worked out of the Thomaston Bureau, a little two-desk room a dozen miles north of the main newsroom. Dave covered Thomaston and I covered neighboring Plymouth. So it was no problem to swing over to Thomaston Town Hall for the Town Meeting with him and grab a few photos for his story.
Every American should experience a New England town meeting at least once. It’s the closest thing to pure democracy possible, with many issues decided by direct votes of the citizenry. Unsurprisingly, said citizenry has many opinions on many things, and is not shy about expressing them. So a discussion and vote on allocating money to fix those nasty Main Street potholes can be followed up by an impassioned plea to do something about the sad fate of Tasmanian marsupials. And many of these more arcane topics were raised by the same citizens at every. Single. Meeting.
So it was no surprise that when a woman began lecturing on the evils of Connecticut Humane Society, the council and citizenry started chatting amongst themselves. There definitely wasn’t going to be a vote on anything happening off in Hartford, so why not catch up with neighbors? Since I was the only one pointing a telephoto lens at her, I was the only one to see that the documents she was angrily waving were from the IRS.
So I grabbed Dave, and we grabbed those documents, headed back to the office and dug into the story.
This is before the Web, and easy online access to government documents. We had to fax Freedom of Information requests to the IRS, but eventually got the Humane Society’s 990 forms, which are the IRS paperwork for non-profit organizations.
A few months later we had ended up at the Society’s headquarters. We had asked questions and asked questions until they invited us to headquarters to meet with their head of finance.
Dave and I were both in our late 20s, and the old money patricians of the Society who met with us that day were clearly unhappy dealing with the hoi polloi. The Society printed a financial statement in their magazine showing it was in the hole by six figures after all the money it spent on caring for animals, despite their constant “Every dollar saves a life” fundraising campaigns featuring photos of sad looking puppies and kittens.
I’ve never really done well with authority – heck, I got banned from the entire Pacific Rim – but I’m not always directly confrontational about it. So when the finance guy began treating us like rubes and explaining math like we were 2nd graders, I may have laid the aww shucks I’m just outta the Army and don’t understand all these big numbers routine on a bit thick.
OK, to be honest, if you had some mayo you could have made a sandwich with all that ham. Still, the more I laid on the ham, the more he explained how every number on that financial report in the magazine led to the next.
And boxed himself in.
Finally we’d worked our to that last number, the six-figure loss. “Do you have any more questions?” he asked.
“Just one,” I said. “I don’t understand how you got from that number to this.”
The copy of the Society’s 990 I slapped down next to the magazine told a far different story. The Society wasn’t losing money; it was making millions. Mostly by taking the donations and investing them into the booming stock market, often into companies with high rates of return and criticism over animal testing practices.
That’s when the finance guy fell back in his chair and turned that peculiar shade. The Chairman strode over to say he was a lawyer and started talking about deceptive reporting.
“I’m going print these side-by-side on the front page of the Sunday paper,” I told him. “Get out,” he said.
So we did.
The finance guy survived, thankfully, and the story led to investigations and change, and won awards-it finished 2nd in the New England Associated Press Investigative Reporting awards to a Massachusetts story that freed an innocent man from a wrongful murder conviction. Which Dave and I thought was fair. The AP split the award between us.
I still have the check for $12.50.
And I went back to work and didn’t think to question further whether there was a human cost to my journalism and joy in theatricality.
Not until a hot summer day a few years later.
There’s an old Army saying; feces rolls downhill. It means angry generals turn on colonels, who then turn on captains, who then turn on sergeants, and it all ends up with a bewildered private wondering why he’s washing trucks in the motor pool at 3 am on a freezing winter night.
That was literally the situation on that hot summer day as I stood in a Southbury, CT, park surrounded by that town’s entire constabulary.
A local Peeping Tom had hatched a cunning plan that morning. He figured he could see an endless parade of naked lady bits by climbing down into the park’s women’s outhouse.
There were several problems with this plan. First, when someone inevitably noticed a creature down in the outhouse under the toilet, she would begin screaming “Raccoon!!! Raccoon!!!”
Second, when the citizenry rushed over they would quickly realize that said raccoon was actually a Peeping Tom, and simply keep the door closed until the constables arrived.
Third, he would be TRAPPED IN A SEWAGE PIT ON A HOT SUMMER DAY.
Southbury constables in those days were issued individual police cars for patrol. The senior constable on duty for the holiday quickly arrived, cuffed the suspect, and said…”Not in my patrol car.” So he called someone junior, who called someone junior, who called someone junior…
By the time I got there the entire constabulary, including the chief and all the off-duty officers, were on scene alternately arguing about who had to load this guy into their patrol car and futilely hosing the guy off.
Finally the problem reached its inevitable conclusion, and the rookie constable loaded the guy into his patrol car and took him to jail. So I wrote it up. It was funny! But it was also a crime story, so it had the guy’s name and address. The editors loved the story and promoted it to the front page of the paper. And I went home happy.
I was sitting at my desk in the Southbury bureau the next day when the phone rang with a call from an extremely angry woman. “You’ve ruined my life. You humiliated me, writing that @#$@#@ about my husband.”
“Lady,” I said to her. “You have a problem.
“It isn’t me.”
I was very sure about many things in my 20s. These days, not so much. And I wonder if there were ways I could have been kinder, and still gotten the story.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Tuesday June 25th - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup
Thursday June 27th - The PE Vlog- Creating a new version of the Pentax Forums YouTube intro bumper
Friday June 28th - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday June 30th: The Reader — Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was black as night - Elementry fact and fiction, why saying Rudabaga causes 3rd graders to giggle endlessly.