I started reading Scott Gold’s Los Angeles Times story on Nov. 26 and was ready to find a reason to go somewhere else. I’d read stories like this; I’d reported this: The rebirth of a gang-invested park.

But then Scott pulled a trick on me and started aiming and hitting me with a beautiful succession of…

…details.

This was not a monster project, just a piece in a series the The L.A. Times is running about impoverished South Los Angeles in an attempt to demystify it.

I started to feel seduced by the use of detail, starting with the snippet about the  rec-park executive approaching a gang leader to ask for help reclaiming the park. I became more attached at the descriptions of the gangs’ lack of father figures.  I got a more intimate feeling when a gang member described his upbringing.

I can’t say this is an award-winning story. But I can say it is compelling one, and if you compare one of your better stories against this one, try to analyze who reports for detail and who uses detail better—you or Scott?

Here’s the story to read, followed by some remarks by Scott about the genesis and execution of this story.

By SCOTT GOLD

Not so long ago, South Park looked like Club Med for gang members.

The neighbors had given up on the little park — ceding it, almost entirely, to the 5-Trey Avalon Gangster Crips. Gangsters smoked pot in the gym and bounced their gambling dice against the concrete steps outside the rec center. There was no grass, and, in the mornings, junkies littered the dirt with syringes and tiny, colorful balloons that had been emptied of heroin. There were no youth sports teams. There was one child — one — enrolled in the preschool program.

“It was,” said Brian Cox, the park’s senior recreation director, “not a park.”

Four years ago, a police crackdown and a decline in violent crime created an opening. Workers planted grass and hung nets from the rusted basketball rims. The park, tentatively, began to rebuild. But to accomplish any sort of rebirth, city officials were forced to admit that they needed help of a different sort.

They needed the gang.

They needed Blue.

His real name was Parie Dedeaux, but he’d always been known as Blue. No one ever had explained it to him. He’d grown up nearby, and he’d been a heavy hitter in the Avalons for two decades, since before he could drive a car. He commanded an inordinate amount of respect on the streets, officials said.

“Before we could get the kids to come back, we had to get those guys to allow the kids to come back,” Cox said. “We could pretend otherwise. Or we could start to work with them. What are you going to do? They ain’t leaving.”

So Blue, instrumental in claiming the park for the gang, would now play a pivotal role in giving it back — an unlikely partnership that would lead to a remarkable resurrection.

Deserted as youths

Blue recently sat in the empty bleachers at South Park and offered a passionate and articulate defense of the gang life, which can be an unsettling thing to hear.

He grew up just a few blocks away, near Avalon Boulevard, back when the area was known as South-Central — before City Hall figured out that the name had become shorthand for urban decay and changed it to South Los Angeles.

He is 38 now, with a barrel chest and Popeye forearms that belie the gray hairs in his goatee. In the gang world, he and his contemporaries are of a specific age. They were the first to become men during the truly terrible years in South L.A. 20 years ago, when crack cocaine came through like a tempest and gangs were averaging a killing a day.

Everyone, he said, seemed to desert them at once. Many of their parents were lost to drugs; his own mother was murdered and his father was addicted and absent, like most of the fathers he knew at the time. The police, he said, became cruel and combative. The schools offered little hope. The factory jobs on Alameda and Slauson — the jobs that had lured his grandparents from Louisiana, like thousands of other African American families — were gone. Blue and his friends had hustled a little cash by offering to pump gas for customers at the local stations; soon, even that was taken away, as crackheads kicked the boys out and took over.

“We didn’t have a man at home. I never had a single man walk through the door and say, ‘I paid the light bill today.’ None of us did,” Blue said.

“So now your mom is getting high. The lights get turned off. The house is getting stinky. We all looked at each other and said: ‘Well, I guess it’s just us now. We ain’t got no malls, no colleges, no jobs. But everybody wants to be a part of something. All we could do is claim . . . this.”

He stretched his arms wide; he meant the park.

A steep decline

It became a headquarters of sorts for the Avalons, and some of them soon began selling the same drugs that had sullied their lives a few years before. The park began a precipitous and notorious decline.

“They owned the park,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Cathy Emestica, a 14-year veteran who has devoted much of her career to South Park and its regulars. “You couldn’t come in or out unless they let you.”

Four years ago, shortly before Cox took over, an Avalon took a shot at a cop. The bullet missed, but for the LAPD, it was the last straw.

The department took the unusual step of erecting five surveillance cameras at the park. Emestica began monitoring the everyday crowd: addicts fresh from the methadone clinic; dealers; gangsters who stared up into her cameras, alternately waving or flipping her the bird. The pace was relentless; in the first year and a half, the LAPD made 1,140 arrests.

Cox, sensing a shifting tide, had begun cracking down. No more pot in the gym. No more dice outside his office. The park started filling up on weekends. It was time to talk to Blue. They sat in the bleachers one day, just the two of them, staring into the caramel-colored dirt in the empty infield on the other side of the fence.

“I’m going to be real with you: I don’t condone what you do,” Cox told him, carefully. “But we’ve got to come to common ground.”

It was a tense conversation, but one that Blue was ready for.

He looked around. The park had been his proving ground, the place where he’d darted between the shaggy palm trees that formed a once-proud promenade leading to the swimming pool. Where he’d earned his first taste of respect behind the rec center, in a little shady spot where the boys went to resolve their disputes. Through all the pain that came with growing up in the neighborhood, the park had been one of the few constants in his life. It had, in a very real sense, sustained him. And now, he realized, he could repay the favor.

“We’re tired,” Blue told Cox. “We got to find a new way.”

So Blue went legit.

A ‘double life’

Truth be told, it wasn’t that much of a stretch.

For years, until he got laid off in a downsizing, Blue had been leading what he called a “double life” — working a respectable job in hardware sales, something he chose to shield from the Avalons as if it were a badge of shame. He cashed in his 401(k) and bought exercise equipment, including a heavy punching bag, which the park allowed him to install in a small courtyard near the office, mostly for the Avalons’ use.

The park also gave him a key to a dank storage room; Blue bought a hot plate and a microwave and began preparing breakfast for the park’s homeless residents.

He also launched a tradition called “Spread Friday.” Each week he and his friends make a goulash of sorts, using only ingredients that are also available for purchase inside local jails: ramen topped with smoked oysters and canned beef, honey, jalapeños and crushed Doritos, tossed inside a garbage bag and doled out to all takers, who are surprisingly many — and eager. The meal, said Blue — who in his 20s served 22 months in prison for robbery — is a reminder that life will always be better on the outside.

Once Blue had signed off on the notion of the Avalons cooperating with the city — or at least allowing the community unfettered access to the park — the floodgates opened.

Using grants and money routed from City Councilwoman Jan Perry’s office, the park built a playground, replaced the gym floor and refurbished a band shell. The park launched a series of music performances. During the first concert, featuring blues and jazz, “everyone held their breath,” Cox said. Nothing happened. So at the next show, Cox asked Blue and his comrades — “the big, bad Avalon Crips,” Cox said with a grin — to provide security. It worked without a hitch.

Today, there are talent shows, tutoring programs, toy giveaways at the holidays. An aerobics class has exploded in popularity; more than 200 women are registered, making it one of the city’s largest park programs for adults. The class is so large that the instructor had to develop hand signals to telegraph dance moves. There are more than 700 children enrolled in classes and sports programs. And there are 18 kids in the preschool.

“Do we still have our problems? Yeah, of course we do,” Cox said. “This ain’t Westwood or Brentwood, and it ain’t never going to be. But we made it work.”

By last year, it was time for the final chapter.

Blue learned that a football program called the Demos was losing its permit to practice at another nearby park. He wanted to bring the program to South Park. Here, that was a radical idea. Many of the players’ fathers were from rival gangs: Pirus, Outlaws, Blood Stone Villains.

“You guys have shot at each other,” Cox told Blue.

“I’ll make it safe, homie,” Blue told him. “I’ll do it.”

‘Showtime!’

It is a Saturday morning in November, early enough that the fog hasn’t yet burned off. The Demos will play six games today — six age brackets — against the mighty Compton Vikings. Blue has been up since 6 a.m. washing uniforms, and as he climbs out of his 1975 Buick Skylark, which is the color of asparagus, he is already champing at the bit.

“Showtime!” he screams.

The city rolled the dice on Blue, and so far he has delivered. At first, parents who brought kids in from other neighborhoods sat in their cars with the engines running during practice. Eventually, they ventured out.

There are now 300 kids in the program — among them Blue’s 11-year-old son, P.J., a running back, and his 7-year-old daughter, Paris, a cheerleader.

On this morning, the first person Blue encounters is Vernard Payne, whose white “P” on his cap says what no one needs to say out loud: that he is affiliated with the Pueblo Bishops gang. Blue and Payne are Crip and Blood; here, they embrace.

“Once you root for my son . . . ” Blue explains.

” . . . It’s over,” Payne says.

“It’s like rehab for gangsters,” Blue says.

Blue walks in as though he’s the mayor, beaming, teasing, high-fiving. “It’s on!” he shouts.

“The mouth is in the house,” someone mutters.

The league is not for the faint of heart. The players’ helmets are gouged and duct-taped, their socks and sleeves full of holes and bloodstains.

“Wake the . . . up!” a coach shouts after Compton makes a big gain on a busted play — he’s talking to a 7-year-old. Another boy seems to wilt under his oversize helmet and misses a tackle. “Tear his ass up!” a coach screams at him, the veins on his neck taut beneath a tattoo of a roll of money.

The early games do not go well for the Demos; Compton seems able to move the ball at will. Blue tries bribery; he offers to buy players hot dogs if they recover a fumble. When that doesn’t work, he bumps his offer up to $5.

Blue erupts when P.J. storms 30 yards on a kickoff return. But when the Demos throw an interception on the next play, Blue hurls his bag of sunflower seeds to the ground.

“We’re out here to win!” he yells. “You’re playing like little punks!”

Soon, though, perspective regained, Blue finds himself in the center of a scrum of players, firing them up for the next game. He has many roles in the league, chiefly that he is its head booster.

“Whose house?” he bellows.

“Our house!” the boys shout.

“Where we from?”

“East side!”

“Where?”

“East side!”

It’s the last bit that always gets to him, he said later.

In the parlance of South L.A., “east side” has long referred to gangs east of Main Street. All of a sudden, the words mean more.

They mean that the east side now gathers in peace, if only once or twice a week, and if only to watch kids play football.

“I’m not just part of a gang. I’m part of a community,” Blue said. “It’s the first time I ever felt that. I’m part of . . . this.”

He threw open his arms again, and fell silent, which doesn’t happen often.

“We’re in the middle of the ghetto,” he whispered. “You hear that?”

Then he smiled, knowing full well that the only thing you could hear — at least for now — was the sound of a lawn mower on the new grass, and the birds in the trees.

HOW I WROTE THE STORY:

scott.gold@latimes.com

I’m been reporting from South Los Angeles for almost a year now for a series of articles looking to reassess the place of this storied, troubled neighborhood in the structure of the city, following a period of transformative change. This article, about the resurrection of South Park, was our 14^th installment. We’ve treated this series as a project with a small “p” – a modern, nimble undertaking that would wed longer narratives like this one with quicker pieces where we break news, as well as multimedia presentations for the web. That’s a lot of elements, so we’ve known from the start that we would need to find ways to make each element in this series stand out – and stand up on its own.

The best way to do that is to take readers into corners of South Los Angeles they’ve never seen before, and hold up a mirror to elements of this neighborhood that brush against the conventional wisdom. And the best way to do all of that is to report, report, report and then report some more until we can offer the public a level of detail that makes it difficult to turn away – even in such a famously fractious and diffuse city, where your life can look nothing like the life of someone who lives a half-mile down the road.

This story was unusual in that the park itself was a central character, in a sense – the only true, faithful companion of a man named Blue, who has spent the better part of two decades as a heavy-hitter in a gang called the Avalons. Both of these “characters” – Blue and the park – needed to resonate to make the story work. And it would not be enough to offer a familiar, bleak story of either one – of a park in the interior of Los Angeles that had fallen into disrepair, nor of a man who grew up in rotten circumstances and then became a gang member. So we needed details. We needed to know exactly what the park was like just a few years ago – gang members throwing their gambling dice against the steps leading to the rec center office, the pitiful fact that there was a single kid enrolled in the preschool. And we needed to know everything about Blue. It wasn’t enough to say that he now feeds the homeless and the junkies after turning over a new leaf. We needed to know this: “Each week he and his friends make a goulash of sorts, using only ingredients that are also available for purchase inside local jails: ramen topped with smoked oysters and canned beef, honey, jalapeños and crushed Doritos, tossed inside a garbage bag and doled out to all takers, who are surprisingly many — and eager.” And it wasn’t enough to know that Blue recently started a youth football program. We needed to know that here, in the heart of the city, even this kind of marked progress comes with rough edges. We needed to see a coach yelling at a 7-year-old: “‘Tear his ass up!’ a coach screams at him, the veins on his neck taut beneath a tattoo of a roll of money.” In the end, it was an imperfect story in an imperfect business. But I do think that because of that detail, we were able to explain, reveal and surprise, which is a pretty good standard.

Got a good example of detailing? Send it to Bob via Newsthiking.com

Julia Scott makes the transition and shares her tips

Julia Scott is a reporter turned blogger who adapted her print skills for the web. She currently writes a savvy-spending blog called BargainBabe.com. I asked her to describe the transition. Read on:

Print journalists may have a hard time transitioning to blogging if they are not willing to let go of some of the basic tenets of traditional newspaper writing. While there are many similarities between the two forms, the difference are striking. Let’s start with what works in both forms:

–Classic, good storytelling

–Solid reporting, great quotes, salient details

–Concise writing

Writing for print vs. blogging

Now let’s talk about the differences:

–Bloggers write more frequently. While there are exceptions, successful blogs generally have multiple posts everyday or each weekday. Some Sports bloggers regularly post a dozen-plus times a day.

–Blog posts are typically shorter. Think 2-8 paragraphs for most posts. The goal is to provide nuggets of information as soon as you get them. Forget about crafting one long story that has complete information. Break up big topics into separate posts so readers can go directly to the information that interests them.

–The structure is simpler. Worry less about a beginning, middle and end than with providing a polished tidbit.

–The style is even more informal and conversational. Remember what your editor said about writing a story like you were telling it to your grandmother? Bloggers write as if they are talking to their bff. –Slang is not uncommon, and the writing often reflects the blogger’s internal dialog in their head.

–Bloggers use first person. Readers want to connect with bloggers and enjoy hearing your opinion, how a particular post relates to your life, and other personal details. Some of my most popular posts are personal stories that have little or nothing to do with my blog topic.

–Bloggers share opinions. Telling readers what you think of an issue can create great discussion via comments, which keeps readers coming back. Be open to dissent and respectful disagreements.

–Bloggers encourage interaction. Readers love to share their two cents and great bloggers embrace this. Feedback via comments, polls, live blogging sessions, Google map mashups, videos, and more can generate tips, create loyalty, and increase the time readers spend on your blog.

Those are the basic similarities and differences. To get a better idea of what makes a good blog post, I encourage you to check out: http://www.bargainbabe.com/

They let you in. Now what?

One of the best feelings as a reader is being pulled along by the story. Sometimes that’s a matter of construction. Other times it’s because the reporter has burrowed into the story so effectivey that the reader feels completely inside the subject’s shoes.

Two months ago, Jenifer Warren, a Sacramento-based reporter for the L.A. Times who covers the state’s overcrowded and curiously administered prison system, hit both of those notes simultaneously.

She did it by asking a question many reporters don’t ask enough: Can I watch? We don’t do it because we have low expectations, or because it would eat up time our editor says he wants for other stories.

What follows is a 2,380-word story that spends more than a thousand words building up to a confrontation, which gave me the sense of anticipation that the protagonist no doubt had. The story also substitutes a lot of paraphrasing for quotes-which a reporter who was granted permission to watch might have felt obligated to use. The virtue here is that paraphrasing allowed the story better velocity.

‘I Want to Watch’

But enough from me. Read on, and I’ll stop the story and let Jenifer explain how she did it. Then we can continue on. (My comments are in CAPS)

TALKING THROUGH THE PAIN
Patty O’Reilly comes face to face with the man who killed her husband.
She listens so she can forgive — and he sees up close the harm he has done.
By JENIFER WARREN

FOLSOM, CA–It’s a warm, cloudless day and Patty O’Reilly is about to meet the man who killed her husband. A million thoughts compete for attention in her head. Two stand out.

Why am I here?

What good will it do?

It has taken O’Reilly 29 months to get to this emotional state, to the point where she can walk on sturdy legs into a maximum-security prison and face a convict who blasted a giant crater in her life.

THE WRITER HAS ENCIRCLED THE STORY IN JUST 65 WORDS.

In the beginning, O’Reilly felt only loathing for the man. She was too wracked by loss to consider anything else.

But gradually she became aware of the possibility, however slight, of finding some useful purpose in her grief. That’s why she is here today, in the belly of the state prison at Folsom, with a water bottle, rosary beads and her sister at her side.

Soon a door will swing open, and inmate No. T22186, a man named Mike Albertson, will appear in his prison blues. The two will sit face to face — victim and victimizer — and talk. What comes out of it is up to them.

The encounter is a first for the California correctional system. Minnesota, Texas and other states have encouraged such dialogues, but California — its prisons beset by overcrowding and countless other woes — is arriving late to the game.

HOLY SHIT, THE READER SAYS, I’M ACTUALLY GOING TO BE ABLE TO WATCH THIS.

O’Reilly, a petite, dark-haired woman of 41, is a willing pioneer. Through her sorrow, she has become a believer in restorative justice, the philosophy underlying her meeting today. To heal, she says, survivors of crime need something beyond the punishments the courts dispense: the chance to hear the truth about what happened to their loved ones and “the empowering opportunity” to look the offender in the eye.

The goal for offenders, meanwhile, is a flesh-and-blood understanding of the harm they have caused. “When you put a real face on the crime and hold them accountable, there’s no escaping the impact,” says Rochelle Edwards, a mediator from the state’s Office of Victim and Survivor Services. Then, she adds, convicts “connect the dots in their own lives” to learn what set them on a criminal path.

“After that, they can’t go back,” she says. “They have too many insights, too many tools, to offend again.”

THE WRITER LETS THE ANTCIPATION BUILD IN TWO SHORT GRAFS

O’Reilly’s trust in the process is strong. But on this September morning, she has no real idea what lies ahead.

Nor does Albertson, 49, the unwelcome intruder in O’Reilly’s life. He has spent months awaiting this day. Abandoned by family and friends, he has had no visitors since he was sent to prison in September 2004. His health is poor, and his remaining 12 years behind bars stretch before him.

THE STORY GIVES A NOD TO READERS WHO ARE OFFENDED BY THIS CONFRONTATION

What good will come from revisiting this crime? What can he possibly say or do to make amends?

“I used to think a great deal of myself, before all this,” Albertson says. “And now I am a person who has done something unimaginable, something so heinous. The pain, fear, sadness and guilt surrounding that are just overwhelming sometimes.”

JENIFER NOW MOVES INTO THE BACKGROUND, BUT LET’S LET HER TALK ABOUT THE STORY FOR A WHILE:

“I first met Patty O’Reilly at San Quentin in mid-2004. She had come to the prison with two other women to share personal stories about crime, about loss, and about the importance of justice and consequences. A petite dance teacher and mother of two, O’Reilly looked terribly out of place at San Quentin, standing before a half-dozen burly, tattooed cons. They were riveted by her. And so was I.

“I had finagled my way into that meeting after weeks of pleading, and by working sources developed over five years of covering the prison beat. No one had been allowed to witness the sessions before, because of the raw emotions exposed and the sensitive details revealed. The ground rules were strict, and our photographer was forced to wait outside throughout the four-hour encounter. First the women told their stories, weeping openly. Then the convicts shared theirs, describing in detail the horrible crimes they’d committed, along with the subsequent work they had done at San Quentin to understand the impact of their acts.

“I wrote a story about that day, about the underlying philosophy of restorative justice and about the tragedy suffered by O’Reilly and her children. But it was a piece that always felt unfinished. O’Reilly had not yet met the prisoner who was personally responsible for her pain, in part because such one-on-one dialogues were not yet permitted in the California prison system. I decided that face-to-face meeting, if it ever took place, held potential to yield an even more powerful sequel, anchored in the scene of a guilt-ridden man sitting inches away from the woman whose life he had forever changed. So I kept in touch and hoped for the best.

“Finally, last summer, the state victim advocate working with O’Reilly called and said a meeting between the Sonoma woman and her offender was scheduled. Pleased with the first story, the mediator and O’Reilly invited me to attend. (Yippee!) The next step was convincing prison administrators it was a good idea to let the press – me – in. This, of course, went against their view of the world, which is that prison walls are intended to keep bad guys in and everybody else out. It took some work, and there were many frustrations. For example, my efforts to visit and meet with the inmate beforehand were rebuffed at the last minute, as I prepared to get in my car and drive to the prison.

“But eventually, somebody in the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation figured out that this might actually be a positive story for the system, as opposed to the daily dose of negative press their operation attracts. So I got the green light, and began preparing for the big day.

“For starters, I needed to interview the inmate, Mike Albertson, to get a sense of him. He had been virtually absent from the first piece. So I conducted several interviews by telephone (collect calls are permitted from the prison) to lay a foundation. Then I did the same thing with O’Reilly, to catch up on her thinking and emotional state. Finally, I interviewed the mediator to learn what to expect and what might go right and wrong for the duo when they finally met.

“Going in, I thought that, like covering an execution, I should consider no detail too small to record. Describing the scene seemed important, particularly since the setting – a prison – holds fascination for people, I think. I also tried to emphasize the tension O’Reilly felt as she waited to meet this man who so fatally changed her life. And I strived, more than anything, to avoid being maudlin, the swamp every writer fears.

“Overall, it was an emotionally draining day, and an emotionally draining story, perhaps because like O’Reilly, I have a good marriage and two daughters and can relate to the devastation she experienced. Thankfully, the story seemed to move people. Every email and letter I received was positive, which is a first on the prison beat, where much of the feedback I get is abusive and unprintable!”

OK, WE PICK UP THE STORY WHERE THE BACKGROUND BEGINS:

The event that knit these lives together happened on a spring evening in 2004, in the heart of Northern California’s wine country. Riding his bicycle home from work, Danny O’Reilly was struck from behind by a pickup truck. In an instant, his life ended at 43. At first, his widow felt she could not go on. Only the needs of her two children, themselves overcome with grief, kept her trudging forward.

Eventually, she resumed work as director of a dance studio and struggled to reassemble her life. Albertson, who had been driving drunk, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a prison term of 14 years. But Patty O’Reilly came to crave a different sort of justice, a more direct expression of accountability from the man who had altered her world.

Two years later, her day begins early, at the modest home in Sonoma she shares with daughters Erin, 15, and Siobhan, 10. After a long drive, she and her sister, Mary Eble, arrive at the prison east of Sacramento. Edwards is with them.

For months Edwards has been preparing O’Reilly and Albertson for their meeting — unearthing possible land mines, suggesting how both might find meaning in their unexpected relationship. Today, she will guide the conversation, provide support. “A human guardrail,” she calls herself.

The warden meets the trio at the prison gate, offering his welcome and a warm handshake. At the first security stop, officers search the visitors’ belongings, almost apologetically. Word of O’Reilly’s purpose here has spread.

GOOD DETAIL NEXT TWO GRAFS

O’Reilly removes her white tennis shoes and crosses through the metal detector. After a short van ride, and two more security checks, the three women arrive at their destination, a small, windowless conference room. The lights are bright, and Edwards does not like the feel of the place, pronouncing it cramped. But it is a prison, and there are no options.

O’Reilly sits in one of five chairs around the table’s edge. Four water bottles are lined up near her, beside a box of tissue. She takes a bite of an apple, then rests her head on both hands and takes three deep, audible breaths.

A low rumble and the clank of doors signal a possible arrival, but it’s a false alarm. As the wait drags on, O’Reilly thumbs through a folder of family photos with her sister and begins to cry.

Finally, an officer escorts Albertson in and sits beside him at the table. O’Reilly searches the convict’s worn face. Albertson, whose graying brown hair is cropped short, swallows hard and nods a nervous hello.

“Let’s take one minute to bring ourselves here,” Edwards says, her calm voice a small ripple in the still pond.

O’Reilly bows her head and prays.

Gently, Edwards sets the dialogue in motion, establishing ground rules. There is no interrupting — if you want to say something, write it down so you don’t forget — and no abusive language allowed.

O’Reilly fixes a level gaze on Albertson and tells him it is her younger daughter who prompted her to come. The child expressed curiosity about the man who killed her father; thus was born O’Reilly’s interest in restorative justice and the healing it might bring. O’Reilly’s daughter has made two cards for Albertson. Her mom pulls out one, decorated with a smiley face surrounded by a heart, and reads it aloud:

Dear Mr. Albertson:
Today is the 16th of August and I will be 10 years old on September first. I just want to make sure you know that I forgive you. I do still miss my dad; I think that’s a life-long thing. I hope you’re feeling O.K.
bye bye,
Siobhan

Albertson blows out a heavy sigh, and silence again overtakes the room. Finally, Edwards speaks, asking the convict how the card makes him feel. His reply seeps out slowly, barely rising above a whisper:

“It almost feels fragile, you know? The resiliency of a child is incredible. The willingness to forgive is incredible.”

O’Reilly nods, and then describes for Albertson the chain of events he triggered.

She talks of her initial hatred toward him, of her belief early on that he should rot forever behind bars. In a low voice that breaks with sobs but never swells with anger, she describes the reminders that punctuate her days — the special songs on the radio, the sight of a bicyclist on the road, the graduations, first communions and other occasions now shared by three instead of four.

Recalling the day her husband was killed, she relates in painstaking detail their last exchange of words, the fear that descended when he didn’t come home, the horror when a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the house, her daughters’ expressions as she gave them the news. Albertson sits frozen, his face contorted.

“Forgive me,” he says when O’Reilly finishes, his voice cracking. “I know the tragedy I’ve caused. I can see it. I don’t know how to fix it — I’m left with no way to fix it. I just have to feel it.”

O’Reilly keeps her moist eyes trained on his face. “Some days all I can do is feel the pain too,” she says. “There is no fixing.”

Two hours have passed in the windowless room.

In the months before his encounter with O’Reilly, Albertson made a shocking confession to Edwards: I may have hit him on purpose. For some, this information — that the death on that Sonoma County road may not have been accidental — would have changed everything. O’Reilly took a few days with the news, and came to a different conclusion.

“The thought of turning back and becoming angry and spiteful just seemed so draining,” she recalled. “I didn’t have that kind of energy in my life. I decided it was better to stay on this path.”

At their meeting, this difficult topic comes up. O’Reilly tells Albertson that she believes it took courage for him to make that admission, and that “of the two of us, in my opinion, you’ve got the tougher row to hoe.”

“We both wake up and Danny’s not there,” she continues, “but I don’t have to live with knowing I took his life…. You’ve taken full responsibility. Maybe this is a chance to redeem yourself.” Albertson looks down, his shoulders slumped. Then, haltingly, he shares his story — what happened on the road that day, and what came before.

He talks of five years of sexual abuse at the hands of his father, of buried memories and stifled rage, of drug addiction, 14 years of sobriety, a broken back, a fateful relapse. The night of the accident, he was out of medication and desperate for relief from pain. No one, he says, would help, so he sat in his truck and drank.

Intoxicated, he called his girlfriend for a ride, but she was disgusted and told him a DUI arrest would serve him right. Angry, he took to the highway, to check himself in to a hospital in St. Helena. Along the way, on curving Mark West Springs Road, he saw a bicyclist.

“Everything was jumbled,” he says, as O’Reilly sits riveted by his words. “There is a part of me that remembers swerving toward Danny…. There’s a part of me that remembers hitting the guardrail. I sat in the truck, I was bleeding. The CHP came and I faked like I had a gun…. I wanted to get shot.”

After a hushed moment, Albertson continues. The stranger on the bike, he concludes, paid a price for a lifetime of rage against a father who raped him and a mother who didn’t stop it.

“Does this give me an excuse to do what I did?” he asks. “No.”

Nearly four hours have gone by, and it is time for this unlikely duo to reach an agreement. O’Reilly asks Albertson to remain active in Alcoholics Anonymous, to continue therapy and to share his story so it may dissuade others inclined to drink and drive. He says he will.

O’Reilly then opens a photo album, showing Albertson shots of her husband’s headstone, followed by a parade of pictures depicting his rich, happy life. The convict thumbs through them slowly, carefully, for a long time.

How do you feel? Edwards asks.

“Looking at those pictures,” he replies, “it was such a wonderful life. And what happened is so tragic. It’s my responsibility.” “Don’t feel sorry for yourself and go backward,” O’Reilly cautions, her voice turning stern.

“No,” he says, “I’ve got that real clear.”

The two exchange rosaries, and O’Reilly gives the convict a bracelet from her younger daughter. He fingers it gingerly, appearing locked in a trance.

Edwards, attempting to sum up the day’s journey, offers a bit of wisdom. The goal, she says, is to make some meaning out of the catastrophe that united these lives — “not sense, but meaning.”

They part. As she passes back through the cyclone fence topped with coiled razor wire, O’Reilly recalls the words of a Catholic nun who ministers to prisoners in Mexico:

Forgiving is hard, but not forgiving is harder.

A week passes. O’Reilly says she feels lighter, unburdened. The encounter has also left her feeling empowered, which she did not expect.

What happened in that room, she says, was true justice, “participatory justice.” It may sound petty, she adds, but she drew strength from watching her husband’s killer sit at that table and witness the devastation he caused.

“If I have to feel this horrible and struggle to find meaning in this loss, I want to make sure he is struggling — and working on problems he used to deny,” she says.

Albertson’s feelings in the aftermath, he confides, are “up and down and sideways.” He is emotionally drained, frequently depressed. But he feels uplifted by O’Reilly’s willingness to meet him, and calls her forgiveness “an incredible, humbling gift.”

The convict is wearing the bracelet made by the little girl in Sonoma. Those cards she sent are on display right beside his bed.

Stuart Pfeifer scores and gets credit for an accidental assist

The first thing I feel when I see a HONOLULU dateline is envy. There it is, on the front page of the L.A. Times. Then the self-absorbedness wears off because the story is moving like a bat out of hell. It’s what, in the earlier days of journalism, was called a “yarn”–no particular significance, just something you can’t stop reading. The kind of story that gives you something to talk about. The kind of story that goes up on high school bulletin boards, that makes the reader put himself in the shoes of the protagonist.

Read the first 14 grafs and see what you think.

FROM PRISON TO A PARADISE FOR ATMS
By Stuart Pfeifer
July 19, 2005

HONOLULU — His living room opens onto a dazzling white beach and a panoramic ocean view. At night, he falls asleep listening to the crashing surf.

DeWayne McKinney has made a fortune selling convenience. He owns cash machines at nightclubs, pedestrian malls and other busy locations across the island of Oahu. Whenever a tourist withdraws cash, McKinney takes a cut.

Knitting the yarn

He spends his days traversing the island in his black Mercedes-Benz, checking on his ATMs. Sometimes, he’ll stop at Pipeline, the legendary surf spot, sip coffee and watch the waves glide to shore.

McKinney could be forgiven for wondering if this could possibly be happening to him. Until 5 1/2 years ago, he was in a California prison, serving a life sentence for murder.

“Sometimes I pinch myself. I’m living here? I know I’ve come a long way from there,” McKinney, 44, said recently. “I’m at peace. In there, there’s no peace. Every day is a day of worry and fear. Here, that doesn’t exist.”

* * *

The gunman entered the Burger King in the city of Orange near closing time Dec. 11, 1980. He leaped over the front counter and forced three employees into a walk-in cooler.

In the back of the restaurant, Walter Horace Bell Jr., the 19-year-old night manager, was counting the evening’s receipts. The gunman forced Bell to open the safe, then shot him in the back of the head.

Six days later, police arrested McKinney, then 20, and charged him with the killing. McKinney grew up in South Los Angeles and Ontario, lost his mother when he was 12 and spent his teenage years running with a gang.

Once, he cut a woman with a knife. A few years later, he and some friends were arrested with a gun outside a jewelry store. For attempted robbery, he was sent to the California Youth Authority.

He became a suspect in the Burger King slaying after detectives collected dozens of gang members’ mug shots from the Los Angeles Police Department. One of the Burger King employees saw McKinney’s photo and thought he looked like the gunman. McKinney was several inches shorter than the man described by witnesses. He walked with a limp; the shooter did not. But at McKinney’s trial in 1982, four witnesses identified him as the killer.

“About the only way to bring in better evidence is if we had a movie of it,” said Tony Rackauckas, then a deputy Orange County district attorney.

McKinney was convicted of first-degree murder and robbery. Rackauckas asked for the death penalty, but the jury deadlocked and McKinney was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

SO DO YOU WANNA KEEP GOING? OF COURSE! LOOK HOW ELEGANTLY STUART SET THE STORY UP: FIVE GRAFS TO PLACE MCKINNEY IN PARADISE. INCLUDING ONE LITLE SENTENCE–”Until 5 1/2 years ago, he was in a California prison, serving a life sentence for murder” — THAT MADE YOU WONDER: IS SOMETHING WRONG? HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?

I’LL SHUT UP SO YOU CAN KEEP READING:

He spent the next 18 years in five California prisons, including Folsom and San Quentin. He attempted suicide, contracted tuberculosis and twice was stabbed by fellow inmates.

He passed the time reading western novels by Louis L’Amour. He found religion and earned his high school equivalency degree. In 1999, two inmates gave statements admitting that they were involved in the Burger King robbery and asserting that McKinney had been wrongly convicted. They identified another man, a career criminal, as the killer.

Investigators with the public defender’s office contacted two of the trial witnesses whose testimony had helped put McKinney behind bars. Shown a photo of the man implicated by the prisoners, the witnesses said that he — not McKinney — was the gunman. After an investigation, Rackauckas, by then Orange County district attorney, agreed that McKinney should be freed. A judge threw out the conviction.

On Jan. 28, 2000, McKinney walked out of the state prison in Lancaster without a driver’s license, a Social Security number, a change of clothes or a toothbrush.

Because he had been serving a life term, the state did nothing to prepare him for freedom. Job training would have been considered a waste of money.

McKinney said he would have been happy to work as a janitor and live in a cheap motel. He had no expectations. But he was not a broken man. In prison, he had made a promise to himself.

“I always said if I was given an opportunity, I’d take advantage,” he said.

He moved into a Costa Mesa apartment provided by the owner of a drug counseling center who had been touched by his story. New friends from the public defender’s office helped him get a job operating audio-visual equipment at a UC Irvine lecture hall. McKinney became a celebrity on the Christian lecture circuit, holding audiences spellbound with his story of how faith sustained him during his years of confinement.

He praised Rackauckas for admitting that a wrong had been done, and even endorsed the district attorney’s reelection bid in 2002. He accepted a tearful apology from the judge who sent him to prison for life. He reconnected with a son born shortly after he went to prison. He became a grandfather. He fell in love and got married.

In the summer of 2002, the city of Orange paid $1.7 million to settle McKinney’s lawsuit against its Police Department and the detective who built the case against him.

When he collected his check, about $1 million after attorneys’ fees and expenses, McKinney gave no thought to an expensive vacation or a new car. He’d heard stories about lottery winners and others who squandered unexpected riches.

“If I wasn’t careful, it would be gone and it wouldn’t benefit anyone,” McKinney said of the money. “I just put it in the bank and tried to find the best interest I could.”

So far the story has run 919 words, and only 96 of them have been quotes. The writer knows that his distillation of the events is compelling and doesn’t require much reflection. This will help not only his storytelling, but– a month later– will also help another reporter, who Stuart doesn’t know, solve a writing problem. Details will follow. First though, let’s bring Stuart aboard to tell us how this story evolved. I, like most readers, had forgotten there was a history here between the reporter and the subject–another example of how, so often, these stories are a hell of a lot harder than they look.

Here’s Stuart:

“The story began for me in 1999, when McKinney was still in prison. I wrote a series of stories–for the Orange County Register–that addressed questions about McKinney’s guilt. I’ve followed his story ever since, reporting on his eventual exoneration and his transition back into the free world.

“In 2002, while at The Times, I wrote a Column One about McKinney’s first two years of freedom; that story looked at how McKinney became a sought-after public speaker following his release and how he had accepted apologies from the judge who sentenced him and from others in Orange County, where he had been wrongly convicted.

“McKinney and I kept in touch, speaking at least once every month or two after that Column One. When I heard about his success in Hawaii, I thought it might be time for another story. Fortunately, the editors in the Orange County edition agreed that it was a good idea and they signed off on a three-day reporting trip to Honolulu.

“It wasn’t a vacation, but rather three long days of reporting. ( I swear. ) Photographer Allen Schaben and I tagged along while McKinney withdrew tens of thousands of dollars from the bank to fill his machines and accompanied him on such routine things as a trip to shop for a new granite counter and a snorkeling trip with his stepson and wife. We also watched him interact with merchants who have allowed him to install machines and learned how he has a surprising knack for networking.

“Once I returned to L.A. and tried to write the story, I realized how much I still didn’t know about McKinney’s life in Hawaii. Many of the details in the story came from the dozen or so follow-up interviews by telephone. Each time we spoke, I learned knew things about McKinney’s experiences in prison and his life today. For example, it was probably in my 10th interview for this story that DeWayne explained how he used a former inmate friend to help him land his first contracts to install ATMs in Los Angeles before the move to Hawaii.

“Much of the credit for the writing of the story should go to [Times project editor] Marc Duvoisin. He came up with idea for the lead and suggested I get McKinney to explain in more detail how he first decided to invest in ATMs, including the nugget about a meeting with a church group when he first heard about investing in ATMs.

“Still, there was one piece of the story missing. The city of Orange refused to comply with our Public Records Act request and would not tell us how much they paid to settle a lawsuit McKinney filed after his release. McKinney was bound by a confidentiality agreement and could not tell me how much he was paid. That’s where Times’ lawyer Karlene Goller stepped in. The city eventually disclosed to us there was a $1.7 million settlement and McKinney finally conceded that his share of that was $1 million, with the lawyers getting the rest. That put into context how he was able to do what he did. Without that figure, there would have been a gaping hole in the story.”

I asked Stuart about the dearth of quotes. He said:

“One benefit of these Col One stories is we often spend considerable time reporting them, allowing us to dig up detail that would not make it into daily stories. As a result, we’re able to write them in a narrative style where our words tell the story, without relying on quotes. I find that quotes can needlessly bog down a narrative story. And when I’m comfortable and confident in the subject, then I don’t need to use someone else’s quotes to explain things.”

Let’s return to the story, which we left as McKinney was receiving his settlement money.

He tapped everyone he met for investment ideas. Some computer science students at UC Irvine suggested he fund a start-up company for which they would design computer games. Too risky, he decided.

An investment advisor said he should consider a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. McKinney didn’t like that idea, either. “I didn’t really want to gamble,” he said. “To me, that’s what it was: a gamble.”

The first idea he liked came from his mother-in-law, a real estate agent. She suggested he buy rental properties. He snapped up half a dozen condominiums in La Mirada.

Then, something clicked at a men’s group meeting at Zoe Christian Fellowship in Whittier. The participants included a Walt Disney Co. executive, the owner of an advertising firm and the head of a construction company.

The ad man mentioned that deregulation had made it possible for individuals to buy and operate automated teller machines.

“The other guys, they were so successful, they weren’t really paying attention,” McKinney recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, that sounds interesting.’ ”

At a political fundraiser a month later, he heard about a businessman who sold cash machines to private investors. They, in turn, found busy locations for the machines and profited from the fees customers paid to withdraw cash. ATMs cost about $5,000 apiece, McKinney learned, but can pay for themselves within a few months.

The business has been growing since surcharges were first allowed in 1996. Today, there are about 400,000 machines in the United States, many of them owned by individuals.

McKinney called a contact he had made at the fundraiser and was soon introduced to Carl Stein, whose company, Automated Cash Management Systems of Mira Loma, sells and installs ATMs in several Western states.

Stein encouraged him to find business owners willing to have the machines on their premises.

McKinney rounded up two buddies: a former car salesman he had met at church, and a parolee from the Lancaster prison. Together, they hit the streets.

The ex-salesman negotiated the first deal, with the owner of a Unocal station in Santa Ana. McKinney put up the money for the machine. Stein installed it in an exterior wall so customers could use it 24 hours a day. McKinney and his friends drove the streets of Los Angeles and Orange counties, looking for other locations. Each time one of his buddies sealed a deal, McKinney paid him $250.

Within a few months, McKinney had 20 machines in operation. In a good month, they generated more than $10,000 in fees. Still, McKinney was restless. Life in Southern California was fast-paced and stressful. His wife, Jeanine, talked constantly about moving back to her hometown, Honolulu.

“In California, it was a nervous feeling. L.A. to me is almost like being in prison. The nervous energy, it never ceased,” McKinney said.

A year earlier, he and Jeanine had used cash from wedding gifts to travel to Hawaii. They snorkeled at Hanauma Bay, relaxed on the sand at Waikiki.

He told Jeanine that he’d move from Southern California, as long as they could find a place on the beach. In 2003, she found a fixer-upper in Laie, near Oahu’s North Shore, and jump-started her husband’s business on the island by signing deals with businesses that wanted ATMs.

McKinney, meantime, sold his California cash machines. On Oahu, he found that business conditions were almost as perfect as the weather. There were lots of tourists and relatively few ATMs.

Prison didn’t teach McKinney much, but it did teach him to make the most of his connections. He used cigarettes to bribe fellow inmates for help landing a job, getting his toilet fixed or obtaining some homemade wine.

In the business world, it’s called networking, and McKinney was good at it. Every acquaintance became a possible lead, like the auto detailer who introduced McKinney to a market owner who agreed to house a cash machine. McKinney tipped the detailer $500 for the lead. Now, all the workers at Island Auto Detail have his business card and are keeping their eyes peeled for ATM locations.

A meeting with his insurance broker led to another deal. The agent’s brother, it turned out, operated the snack shop at the Honolulu Zoo. McKinney soon had an ATM there. It brings in about $1,250 a month.

“Right off the bat, within the first few months, we had the best accounts on the island,” McKinney said. One day, he stopped at the International Marketplace, a shopping plaza where he has two machines. After a couple of smoothies, he had another tip: Duke’s Lane, an adjacent shopping area, didn’t have an ATM. After a year of negotiations, McKinney had a machine there too.

Last year, he and his wife divorced and divided the machines. McKinney said that his years behind bars had left him ill-equipped for marriage.

In prison, “you’ve got to stand your ground. I started to realize that’s how I responded to my marriage,” McKinney said. “I don’t know how to give in, whether I’m right or wrong. I don’t know how to say, ‘OK, you’re right.’ ” After the divorce, McKinney retained nine ATMS on Oahu. He built his holdings back up to 20 machines, including two in Kona on the Big Island.

Some of his ATMs handle hundreds of transactions per day, charging customers $1.75 to $2.50 for each one. McKinney gives a cut of the fees to store owners. He said his machines are on pace to bring in $30,000 this month alone. ATM owners typically fill their machines with money borrowed from a bank. They recoup the funds electronically from customers’ accounts and repay the bank with interest. McKinney, in contrast, stocks his machines with money from his nest egg, thereby avoiding borrowing costs.

It’s a low-overhead business. McKinney has no employees. He tracks his machines via the Internet on his home computer. He can tell which need service, which are performing well and how much money has been withdrawn that day.

If a bill jams or an ATM runs out of cash, McKinney doesn’t get paid. So he befriends employees at the stores, shopping centers and bars where he has machines. They have McKinney’s cellphone number and call him if there’s a problem.

Other than the flashy car, McKinney hardly looks the part of a successful entrepreneur. He wears shorts, sandals and a T-shirt most days. He’s quick to flash a “hang loose” sign, and he calls his friends “brudda,” the Hawaiian equivalent of “dude.”

Stein, who helped McKinney launch the business, says the former inmate’s business acumen is astonishing. “How many people could go to prison two years and do as well as DeWayne has? He was in prison 20 years, and now he’s on his way to being a millionaire.” McKinney says he’s always had a head for business.

“I was working and selling since I was a kid. Selling papers. Washing dishes. Bagging groceries. Selling candy. Cut people’s grass. Everything I wanted, I worked and saved for all my life.”

McKinney used to leaf through travel magazines in the prison library and dream about places like the Hawaiian Islands. Now, he lives there.

In 2003, he paid $740,000 for a beachfront compound in Laie with five units. He lived in one and rented out the others. He built his living room around a plasma screen television — a symbolic centerpiece for a man who saved $10 a month from his prison job for two years to buy a TV for his cell.

McKinney recently sold the property — for $2.7 million, he said — and invested in more real estate on Oahu, including a beachfront home in Honolulu, where he now lives. He estimates his net worth at more than $3 million.

“I’ve just been lucky. I rely on my intuition a lot. I don’t have a [college] degree. The way I look at it, God is still watching out for his boy. What else could it be?” he said.

In January, he marked the fifth anniversary of his release from prison. It was like any other day in paradise.

“I finally found my place,” McKinney said. “I enjoy being able to breathe the fresh air, feel the wind on my face and know I’m free. I enjoy watching the sun set and the sun rise. I lay in my house with the doors open, feeling the breeze.”

—30—

Coda: I was raving about Stuart’s story to Sue Doyle, a former L.A. Times staffer who was wrting for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and has since moved to the Los Angeles Daily News. Mostly I was raving about the flow of the story, created by the elimination of many quotes. A few weeks later Sue sent me an e-mail:

“I thought of you on Friday when I was writing a story about an unbelievable situation…a mother and father are raising the children of two of their adult dead children. (the brother and sister died about 4 months apart..he was murdered. she was found face down dead in the rain from an overdose….to top it off, someone stole their dead daughter’s credit card! So they just finished that fraud trial and now their son’s murder trial is set to start)…The situation is really traumatic for the grandparents who suddenly find themselves raising these kids and grieving their own kids…but none of their quotes were anything very remarkable. After all, what more could they say?

“So I was stuck when I sat down to write it….but then I heard you in my head talking about how swiftly a story moved without quotes (you had been talking about a front page piece from July about a guy who went from prison to millionaire owning ATMS in Hawaii. I read that piece after you talked about it). So anyway — my very long story ended up having just two quotes…one from each parent. And I think that worked out well, because it was their story — their situation — was the most compelling part of the whole thing and not anything that they could say about it.

“It helped me think of the story in a different way…and made the piece work!”

Goal by Doyle. Assist from Pfeifer.

Nick Sortal’s formula for finding true-life tales

I still remember, probably 12 years later, hearing a newsroom colleague in his 40s say he had to find another kind of reporting job because he was “too old to talk to strangers.” I knew exactly what he meant: Many of us are programmed as introverts; we approach strangers only because we have to; there’s no other way to get the goods.

Nick Sortal is a reminder of why you HAVE to talk to strangers. He’s a feature writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and he specializes in. . . well, the ordinary. What follows are three of his stories, prefaced by Nick’s brief explanations.

As I read these I thought about how newspapers are killing themselves to give readers “news you can use” or projects that will win an award, and how little attention is paid to the spectacularly difficult task of finding lives that are profoundly interesting–yarns readers will tell each other, stories that will be clipped and posted on high school bulletin boards, tales that make you feel alive, connected to the human race–when in fact, they have no practical advice in them at all, except to pull you out of the horrible isolation that surrounds most of our lives.

Step away from the vehicle

Editors desperate to counter circulation losses are aware these kinds of stories don’t have to be in the paper, so they forget about them. Call me naive, but I contend that what will save this business–the only thing left that print can do that the Internet and radio and TV can’t do–is putting more stories in the paper that don’t have to be in the paper.

Nick’s advice:

“First, get out of the newsroom; then, get out of your car. And preferably, go someplace that you haven’t been to before. You’ll likely end up with a good story.

“It takes a little bit of gumption — “What if they don’t like strangers,” or, worse “What if they’ve read my stuff and hate me?” — but in order to write human stories about Everyman, you have to get out and mix it up with them.

” Sales folks call it cold-calling. (Get over the whole “I’m not a salesman” tripe. What are you doing when you’re pitching to get your story onto A-1?) They also use the “one-in-four” mindset: Three rejects in a row only means that the odds are that much greater for a hit on attempt No. 4.

“I’m embarrassed to say it took me five years to get out of my car — in this case, off my bike — and talk to Donald Miller. He’d walk for hours, and he wore the same shirt and pants every day. I waved, he waved back and I continued with my bike ride or jog.

“I watched him walk around my neighborhood and wondered…Did he have some psychosis? Was he a former athlete? Did he missed his wife, who had died years ago?

“Turns out, everyone in the neighborhood wondered the same thing. But no one asked him.

“I thought of myself as the one guy in my neighborhood who stopped to ask him what’s up. Getting paid was a bonus.”

A WALK IN THE PARK

The sun isn’t up yet, but Donald Miller locks his second-story apartment and eases downs the stairs to the ground floor. It takes a few seconds to get the morning creaks out.

He’s an 82-year-old man going on a 10-mile walk.

“Gonna be a nice one today,” he says, but you get the feeling that’s his line every day before going around and through Plantation Central Park. Because he’s consistent.

He has walked every day this year, he says, and in each of the past 17 years he has at least walked the equivalent of Maine to San Diego, Calif.

Just for the fun of it.

About 6 a.m., Miller heads toward Cleary Boulevard. It’ll be about 2 miles to Nob Hill Road. The traffic is just awakening and the RPMs are the lowest they’ll be for the next three hours.

He wears the same blue-gray pants, Kmart T-shirt and white visor. When they deteriorate, he replaces them with the most economical replicas.

He likes it simple.

His walking record was 5,300 miles when he was 72. But even this year, admittedly slowing down and going easier on weekends, he’ll stroll more than 3,500. The 17-year grand journey: about 74,000 miles.

He’s not a slave to his route. He’s not beholden to time. He does not have a family to report to. He even is free enough to step on the sidewalk cracks.

On this day, to get in another mile, Miller doubles back three times along Nob Hill Road. Jack Fisher, a crossing guard for nearby Central Park Elementary School, starts his shift at 7 a.m. and the pair often discuss the Dolphins, the Marlins, the Heat — and the heat.

Fisher has stood at this corner for five years, watching Miller walk through the rain, usually without a jacket, and the humidity, still in his long pants.

“I think the walking keeps him going,” says Fisher, also 82. “He’s here every single day. Unbelievable.”

By 8 a.m. Miller has taken a shady route past a dozen developments, catching Broward Boulevard and heading east. He pulls on his visor as the maintenance crews fire up their mowers and the rush-hour crowd accelerates through yellow lights. His story unfolds with each step.

The details: Mr. Miller was born in South Dakota, grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and played baseball, football and basketball, but wasn’t anything that special, he says. In 1942 he joined the military and left it 12 years later to care for a mother who had a stroke and a father with arthritis. He just never got around to dating, let alone marriage.

He spent about two decades as a USDA poultry inspector. He retired at 52, then moved to South Florida three years later, in 1976, after his parents died. He lives off his pension, savings and investment interest.

And he walks.

He always liked to walk, but only began keeping track of mileage in 1985 at age 65. At his peak, he hoofed it for six hours a day.

“I just found myself with a lot of time and not much to do,” he says.

He enters Central Park (Mile No. 6) from the south, and acquaintances’ waves and greetings invigorate him.

He circles the soccer and baseball fields and meets regulars Vi and Jack Miessau. They’re up to eight miles a day.

“I think he’s a shining example for all of us,” says Vi, 65. “I got my husband walking by telling him that if Donald can do it, so can he.”

Leonard “Pete” Peters catches up for a half-hour and confirms the story: Miller is out here every single day, even in the rain.

“He’s kind of hard-headed that way,” Peters says. “But he’s just a polite, Southern gentleman who likes walking. I’ve never even heard him curse.”

(For the record: Miller says he missed one day last year and he had a six-week spell off, probably in 1997, because his right foot was stressed.)

“But I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been healthy,” he says. The exercise has melted him down from 180-plus to 160 pounds now, thin for a 6-footer.

Miller takes a quick bathroom break, then makes his final meander through Central Park, back to Broward Boulevard. His shoes still look new; he’s good about rotating them. Whenever Kmart or Wal-Mart has a sale, he’ll buy two or three pairs.

“I’d pay $30, $35 for shoes, but never $60 or $70,” he says. “But I look for shoes with a good heel.” He changes them every 500 or 600 miles.

By 9 a.m., starting Mile No. 10, he heads for home. The traffic thins and his pace slows.

“I used to be able to walk 15, 16 miles a day and not even think about it,” he says. “Now after about 10, I need to get in a little rest.”

He walks through the parking lot past his car, a 5-year-old Ford Escort that just crossed 15,000 miles. On foot, he has logged about 19,000 miles since he bought that car.

“That’s astonishing, by any measure,” says Mark Fenton, host of the PBS-TV show America’s Walking, and a former Olympic-caliber race walker. He says elite competitive race walkers in their prime rarely hit that accumulated mileage for a year. Fenton himself aimed for 3,000, although at a faster pace.

But Miller says it’s not all that special.

“You see, that’s all I do, and I go home to an apartment,” he says. “I don’t mow grass or have any chores. I probably don’t work out any more than anybody else.”

And even Donald Miller has his limits. At 9:21 a.m. he heads toward the stairs and his apartment. But they don’t look very appealing.

He takes the elevator.

He’ll enjoy a quick rest, a hot shower and breakfast. Then one aspirin, a multivitamin and a smidge of Bengay to his sore right calf. Later in the day, he’ll likely drive to a local bowling center, to watch acquaintances, socialize and just kill a couple of hours.

“I don’t like staying around much in my apartment,” he says. “I like to get out and see what the rest of the world is doing.” Which is why the next day, before sunrise, he’ll be up and ready, eager to do it all over again.

NICK: About the same time, I decided to enhance a routine story about a city cleaning up a park. One old man, who I had seen before on my drives, always waved at me.

He lived near the park, so he was perfect for adding a human to the story. What I didn’t realize was the story behind the story, but once I got out of the car, the story all but fell into my lap.

I got a bonus, in terms of narrative tension and detail, by holding onto the story for about a year. But it’s interesting how much luckier you get just by getting out of the car.

A WAVE FOR GRANDPA BOB

Down a Miramar side street, the old man sat in a plastic chair, smiling, waving at everyone who passed.

They’d honk and wave back.

“Every single person waves at me, I don’t know why,” he would say. “I have no idea who 90 percent of them are.”

Every day for 10 months of 2002, 82-year-old Robert Parr would travel from his bed to his carport, and no farther, waving at neighbors as he picked up the daily paper.

That is what made him happy.

He’d ask the flow of drop-in visitors how they were doing, and would have a water bowl out for their dogs. Some of the neighbors are original homeowners from 1967, when the houses went for $15,000 and there wasn’t anything but black Angus cattle to the west.

But other visitors were new faces, and like the rest of Miramar, often from another country. Parr befriended the Haitian family down the block, the Dominicans two doors away and the Cubans across the street.

Some children would call him “Grandpa Bob,” but not all. The rest called him “abuelo Robert.”

They may have noticed that his arms were bruised purple — he fell four times last year — and that his legs were giving out. They may even have noticed that he kept a portable phone clipped to his three-wheeled walker, just in case he needed to dial 9-1-1.

But if they didn’t notice, he sure as heck wasn’t going to say anything about it. He wasn’t going to listen to any doctor, either.

“What do I need to go to some doctor for? To find out I’m getting old? I already know that,” he would say. “Really, I’m lucky, because I don’t have any pain.”

His calendar was bereft of doctor’s appointments. His real medicine? The best neighbors a guy could want.

Because Parr lived alone now.

The first big curveball in Parr’s tale came in 1982 when his precious wife, Hazel, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was only 62, but he did what he had to do.

Parr quit his job as a warehouse manager. He and his wife would live off Social Security and what they’d saved. “I’d do the same thing all over again,” he’d say. “If ever there was an angel in this world it was her. She never spoke bad about anyone, never. You just had to know her.”

He spent the next 12 years caring for her, first providing encouragement and an occasional drink of water. Then, as her legs gave out, he pushed her for miles up and down a small park near University Drive. Eventually he’d carry her to doctor’s appointments, then stay awake at night gazing at her during the rare moments she could peacefully sleep.

On July 24, 1994, he said goodbye to Hazel.

Parr shared the pain with his adult son, Robert. Not Robert Jr. — the Parrs gave one boy that name but he died very young, so this one would be Robert H. He was a cop, and a good one: lots of decorations from the Broward Sheriff’s Office and kind words from almost every peer. He busted scam artists, the people who rip off the elderly.

But then Robert H. felt a little pain in his mouth. Cancer took his tongue, then his larynx. Still, speaking by voice box, he won officer of the month.

Finally, he was communicating by typing on a computer, still working until the day he died.

On Aug. 17, 1999, Robert G. Parr said goodbye to Robert H.

“You never get over losing a child,” he’d say. “You just don’t.”

But you can go on. Enjoy each day.

“I’ve learned in 80 years to take it as it comes. “It’s bad luck losing your wife, but you wouldn’t want her back here suffering. There’s bad luck to losing a son, but you wouldn’t want him back here with no tongue.”

But here is where his luck turned.

“I don’t have neighbors,” he’d say. “I have family.”

The morning would start with help from Emery, from a few houses down. Robert gave him a key a few years ago, so Emery would let himself in and set up the coffee pot.

Robert would pour a cup, and with the help of his walker, move out to his carport to sit and watch traffic. Three open chairs surrounded him, awaiting the day’s visitors.

His friend Sue would check in daily and buy groceries for him on Thursdays. Her son would do a quick regular cleaning of his pool, which Robert hadn’t set foot in since Hazel died. Another neighbor, Roni, would take his clothes to her house and wash them about once a week.

His daughter-in-law, Robert H.’s wife, called daily. For a birthday present, she hired Maid Brigade to come clean his house monthly, which was plenty because he didn’t dirty it up much.

Another neighbor called Meals on Wheels, and the agency’s weekly delivery filled the refrigerator. The Winn-Dixie Chex root beer that Emery would drop off washed it all down.

Parr was grateful for the basics and for his neighbors, but even more amazed at how others would be so willing to help keep an old man from feeling lonely.

Two Haitian ladies from St. Bartholomew Catholic Church, apparently out on a quiet walk one day, befriended him.

From then on, they delivered a rosary prayer regularly.

And the sister-in-law of the Dominican friend down the street gave him a spiritual boost, too, making his heart beat a little quicker every time he’d see her station wagon pull up.

Out would pour five children, who surrounded him, held his hands and warbled through a quick hymn and a prayer. They’d be back in their car and on their way, but not before he got five hugs and five kisses.

“I really don’t know what they’re saying,” he’d say. “All I know is Feliz Navidad.”

Between visitors, he watched the mail for his Social Security check: $788 went pretty quickly after taking out a portion to pay toward the annual $1,048 in house insurance and $1,300 in property taxes. He asked Medicare to pay for an electric wheelchair or buggy, so he could ride down the street, but no luck.

Yes, he’d heard of old-folks’ homes, where the money goes farther and the care is professional. But he never wanted to go there. “I don’t want to live in a home. I have a home,” Robert would say.

And he would miss his neighbors. Even the ice-cream man, who would turn down the music to shout “hi” out the window. “Someplace in my life I’ve just done something right,” Grandpa Bob would say. “But whatever it is, I don’t know.”

But then, on the first Saturday in November, he called a neighbor, and it was serious. An ambulance came and he was in the hospital with a form of gangrene. A payback for ignoring diabetes.

He lost a little toe. Then a leg. The neighbors steadily came to visit, and in one way his circle of friends grew even larger. People like Amy, the nurse at Memorial Hospital Pembroke, and Tami from Springtree Rehabilitation Center in Sunrise.

Back home, the strangers accustomed to his wave began to worry. They taped notes to the plastic chair in his carport, asking of his whereabouts.

By Thanksgiving, he was back in the hospital, wondering where he’d be going and what would happen next.

“I want to go back to my carport,” he said one December day. But a week later, he said, “I want to be with my wife and my son.”

At 4:11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Robert Parr said goodbye.

The neighbors and his daughter-in-law made all the arrangements, and it was at this time that Grandpa Bob’s stubborn streak paid off.

You see, he never let them talk him into moving his beloved Hazel’s ashes from his home.

Kept them tucked away in a closet all these years, despite neighbors’ pleas that Hazel deserved better.

So now his ashes will be mingled with Hazel’s in a dual brass urn, with the words “Together Forever” engraved on it. They’ll be kept in a niche across from their son’s, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Oakland Park.

And after Grandpa Bob is put to rest Saturday, almost everybody on the block who he touched — and who touched him — will gather at the spot where they shared their lives: a breezy carport with four plastic chairs and a community dog bowl.

NICK: The city of Pembroke Pines has the Donnith Fletcher Art and Cultural Center, and even a plaque commemorating Donnith Fletcher, the first resident to die in the Vietnam War. I always wanted to find Donnith’s mom and ask what it’s like now, especially since moms with sons in Iraq are getting that same knock three decades later. The clips had a brief mention of Mrs. Fletcher, who had since re-married.

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

News traveled slower during America’s last unpopular war.

A story buried in the July 1, 1970, newspaper reported that eight unidentified men, aboard two helicopters, were shot down in Cambodia the day before. It took two more days for the man in the car with the U.S. Army license tag to pull into Beulah Kellam’s driveway in Pembroke Pines.

At 7:10 a.m. July 3, he rang the doorbell. He looked at his clipboard, confirmed that the woman at the door was Donnith Fletcher’s mother and began, “I’m sorry, but it’s my duty to inform you …”

The past year has rekindled those memories and she feels a little pang each day the TV reports more young Americans dying in war.

Nobody ever truly gets over the jolt of that visit. But she has the perspective of time — and plenty of advice — for the families of the 850 or so soldiers who have died in Iraq. The ones whose wounds are 34 years fresher than hers. The pain eventually eases, says Beulah, who lost one husband before Donnith’s death and another one after. Faith can carry you, she would advise. And your child didn’t die in vain.

Donnith Fletcher left for Vietnam from his Army training post in Oakland, Calif., on Oct. 3, 1969, and wrote often to his family, reassuring that he’d be back soon.

Beulah believed it. On June 29, 1970, Beulah saw the 6 p.m. news and smiled when the anchorman said U.S. troops were leaving Cambodia and the most dangerous part of her son’s stint was over.

“I was so relieved,” Beulah says. “I thought he was out of there.”

But he wasn’t. Fletcher and others stayed back, about two miles inside Cambodia.

On June 30, Fletcher and seven others were shot down and killed. The soldiers were on helicopters Nos. 3,862 and 3,863 to be reported shot down or missing during the Vietnam War, and Beulah never did find out details — such as who did the shooting or what exactly her son was doing. They were among the 58,000 Americans who died in the 11 years of the U.S. involvement. Beulah says she barely remembers the minutes after the Army official told her Donnith had been killed. She had seen the Army car pull into the driveway, but it was morning and she was groggy.

“I thought they were coming to tell me he was coming home,” she says. “I really thought it might be good news.” Donnith, 21, was buried July 10 at Fred Hunter’s Memorial Gardens in west Hollywood, a mile or two from Beulah’s home, his McArthur High School and their church. The military delivered a posthumous Purple Heart.

She contrasts that time with the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, where grieving families are photographed within hours of a soldier’s death, and names like Pat Tillman make the TV that night and the front page the next day.

“I can’t say one way or the other is better, because both are sad, but now they have too much information that comes too soon,” she says. “It makes people more frightened and uptight. We see so much and it’s so fast. It’s just right there in your face.”

It always amazed Beulah that her friends tiptoed around saying Donnith’s name, like they would somehow be uncomfortably jogging her memory that he is dead. But that kind of loss never drops out of a person’s head. It just shifts off to the side enough so you can get through the day.

“People didn’t want to talk about him,” she says. “But you want to talk about him, because you don’t want them to forget what happened.”

Donnith was the first Pembroke Pines resident to die in the war, and city officials made sure he would be remembered. In 1971, they named the ball fields and park near Johnson Street and University Drive after him. (In 1993, officials tried to rename the park in honor of Mayor Charles Flanagan, mistakenly believing Donnith Fletcher had been a developer, not a soldier. Flanagan supporters backed off after learning the real details.)

In 2000, the city added Fletcher’s name to a new art center next to the park. The Donnith H. Fletcher Art and Cultural Center displays his photo inside and a framed copy of a 1972 newspaper article detailing Fletcher’s life.

She’s proud that he was a good soldier even as a child. He was a crossing guard in grade school, had a paper route in high school and always did what Beulah told him to, she says. So did his younger sister, Kathy.

“They behaved like children did when I was a child,” Beulah recalls. “They never got into that ’60s rowdiness.” Outside, over by the Fletcher Park ball fields, are a cannon, flowers and a tombstone-style monument. Beulah says it would have been important to Donnith for the park to honor not only him, but also everybody who fought.

So the monument reads: “To the men and women who have given their lives in defense of this country and all who were in conflict.”

Meanwhile, Beulah has carried on as normally as she could. Her first husband died in a car crash when Donnith was 7, and Beulah married William Kellam two years later. But William had a stroke in 1989 and died. Beulah was a widow again. She socialized with friends at the First Baptist Church of West Hollywood, and neighbors often visited, even spending the night.

“I hated being alone,” she says. “I can’t tell you how blessed I am to have the neighbors that I have.” Those friends and her church have pulled her through, says Beulah, 74.

“If I weren’t a Christian, I don’t know how I would have handled it,” she says. “Especially in those first years after Donnith died, I just kept telling myself `He’s with the Lord, he’s with the Lord …’”

Six blocks away, unknown to Beulah, Philip Simons was similarly alone. His second wife had just died and he was resigned to life as a widower.

Even though Simons was Jewish, his daughter suggested he attend a nearby church: Beulah’s First Baptist. He tried it and felt comfortable there. Finding another spouse was not a priority.

“I remember praying, `God, if you’re going to give me someone in my life, you’re going to have to bring her to me, because I’m not going out looking,’” Philip Simons says.

It took a while for that 1994 prayer to get answered. He sat near the front of the large church, and she sat toward the middle. But in January 1996, a mutual church friend did the introductions.

Both were — and still are — smitten. They were married within four months and Philip moved into Beulah’s house.

He wakes her up in the middle of the night to tap into her lifelong knowledge of the Bible, and they talk about America and the need for values. They have no jealousy when one of them talks about a former spouse because their experiences are so similar.

On Memorial Day and Veterans Day, they go to Donnith’s grave site.

“She believes the Lord handles all of our problems. She’ll drop an earring post and ask God to find it. And he does,” Simons says.

They also share a faith and respect for their country. Simons tracks down car-dealership managers if their lot is displaying a tattered flag, and he gets dismayed if he sees a car with the flag on the driver’s side. The proper side is the right, he notes. They put up a 21-foot flagpole in their front lawn more than four years ago, partially as a tribute to Donnith, but for everyone else, too, he says.

“If this country and our freedoms aren’t worth fighting for, why are we here?” she says.

Shawn Hubler on following–and transcending–the competition

“One of the least appealing jobs in journalism,” says Shawn Hubler of the L.A. Times’ San Francisco bureau, “is ‘following’ a story that has broken elsewhere. But for correspondents in bureaus, where the hometown paper nearly always has both the larger staff and the home-court advantage, ‘follows’ are a daily fact of life. The best you can hope for is the chance to fill gaps that the initial story left unfilled.

Shawn recently did that and more with a story about aviation legend Chuck Yeager. Yeager, memorialized by actor Sam Sheppard in the movie “The Right Stuff,” had remarried later in life and was being sued by his children, who claimed Dad’s new bride was exerting undue influence.

Fortunately for Shawn, the story she wound up following had only been reported from one side. Read some of her piece, and then we’ll let her fill you in on her experience:

FAR FROM HEAVEN
By Shawn Hubler
July 2, 2004

NEVADA CITY, Calif.–Four years ago, shortly after his 77th birthday, Chuck Yeager went for his usual walk. The man who broke the sound barrier had been widowed for 10 years, lived next door to his daughter and was all but deaf in one ear. Still, when a much younger woman materialized on the path and struck up a conversation, he says, he got the message.

Winning from behind

Twenty-four hours later, they were dating. Within a month, she had moved in. It happened so fast, Yeager’s children would later say, that they couldn’t help wondering about the then-41-year-old girlfriend, an out-of-towner named Victoria Scott D’Angelo who claimed to have had careers in show business and investment banking, yet appeared to be unemployed and transient.

Discreetly, Yeager’s daughter Susan looked into her background. What she found — lawsuits, restraining orders, claims of harassment and misrepresentation, an alleged physical attack on an elderly woman — so troubled her that she confronted the couple.

D’Angelo denied everything, then blamed her accusers, then claimed to have changed her ways, according to Yeager’s children. Within months, acquaintances and business associates of Yeager contend, D’Angelo began telling them that Susan Yeager, who managed her father’s finances, was stealing from him. By the following year, the retired brigadier general had fired his accountant, his estate planning lawyer, his longtime personal secretary — and his daughter. Last year, in a ceremony to which his children and friends weren’t invited, Yeager wed D’Angelo.

SHAWN HAS SKILLFULLY ENCIRCLED THE BACKGROUND IN FOUR PARAGRAPHS. SHE MAKES SURE YOU NOTICE THIS BY USING THE WORD “NOW” TO BEGIN THE NEXT GRAF, WHICH SUMS UP WHERE THE CASE NOW STANDS. WITHIN THE SAME GRAF SHE MAKES SURE TO SUMMARIZE THE COMPETING WORLD VIEWS OF THE PRINCIPALS.

Now, in a private legal proceeding scheduled to begin today, a court-appointed referee here will harvest the fruit of the now 81-year-old Yeager’s romance — a tangle of bitter lawsuits that officially center on two pieces of property, $113,000, a tractor, some lithographs and the rights to Yeager’s life story. The children, though, say it’s really about the woman who, as one son, Don Yeager, put it, “has pretty much succeeded in killing our family.”

Not so, she counters.

“They’re just trying to make a circus sideshow and use me as a decoy,” said the new Mrs. Yeager, who, with her husband, contends that the case is just about whether Yeager’s children broke the law in their zeal to thwart his new love. “They don’t really care about their father,” she said. “They just care about having his money for themselves.”

A PAUSE FOR SOME GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE.

It is, in some respects, a common family trauma — aging father falls for a woman younger than his grown kids. In this case, however, the conflict comes juxtaposed against Yeager’s heroic reputation: the flying ace who in 1947 made history in a Bell X-1 rocket aircraft named for his first wife, Glennis. The man’s man from West Virginia who, as Tom Wolfe so memorably put it, epitomized “The Right Stuff.”

NOW SHAWN GOES DEEPER INTO THE MOST DELICIOUS ASPECT OF THE STORY-THE NEW WIFE.

It also comes with his new wife’s back story.

“I never had any problems with anybody in the 47 years I’ve been alive until I invited her into my house,” said Nansea McDermott, a single mother in the San Fernando Valley who briefly leased Victoria Yeager, then Victoria D’Angelo, a room in 1997 and “had to call the police every day.”

“She was like that movie ‘The Bad Seed,’ ” said Michele Leavitt, a Winnetka homemaker whose now-deceased mother, then a 77-year-old with bone cancer, also rented a room in her home to D’Angelo, only to end up seeking a restraining order against her. “Horrible. Awful. And to have this happen to someone who’s like an American hero. It’s so sad.”

“Oh, yes, it’s ‘too bad’ — that’s always the last paragraph of these letters I get from people since all this started,” said Yeager as his wife nodded at their kitchen table here in Gold Country. This was on a recent Saturday and he was slightly flushed, having just spent half an hour, at her behest, changing the locks on the ranch house his daughter built for him in 1997.

“I don’t give a rat’s fanny what the kids think of me and what I do,” Yeager continued, his jaw set. “They’re not going to control my life.”

LET’S LET SHAWN TELL US THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY:

It was a story I read all the way to the end, as they say, when it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in February 2004. The story had all sorts of angles – Yeager was a celebrity, the remarriage touched on societal hot buttons such as elder abuse, blended families and aging. Morover, the fact that it could be pegged to a lawsuit meant that much of the case would be documented in a public record, and thus obtainable with a minimum of prurience and intrusiveness. (And by the way, regardless of what people say about reporters, no one enjoys being intrusive, journalists included – gossip is as demoralizing on the job as it is in life.)

Strangely, though, the Chronicle story only quoted Chuck and Victoria Yeager, and made no attempt to verify claims that she had had a checkered past in Los Angeles. His children and their lawyer, the story said, had declined to comment – not so unusual in lawsuits – but made little more than a few allusions to her life in Los Angeles before she met Yeager. A subsequent item in People magazine had essentially the same material – interviews with the couple, a polite no-comment from the kids, no digging whatsoever to check out allegations that the wife was a charlatan.

The timing and the incompleteness of these stories gave me my follow. Features on pending court cases can pretty much run any time before the opening arguments, but most papers like to peg them either to the filing of the case or the start of the hearing. The first stories took the earlier peg, leaving me the latter – and plenty of time, which, as it turned out, I would need. My first calls to the Yeager children and their lawyer left the clear impression that they still weren’t talking. But Victoria Yeager returned my call within hours of my first conversation with her lawyer, and spoke to me at length over the phone before scheduling a face-to-face interview with her and her husband at their home.

A trip to Nevada County (3 hours from San Francisco) to look at the court file yielded a huge trove of public information, including a list of dozens of Los Angeles cases that had involved Yeager’s new wife. Clearly, she was the key to this story. All I needed to do was dig.

And the more I dug, the clearer two things became: 1) Yeager’s new wife was highly litigious and 2) I could not afford to make a single mistake if I didn’t want to get myself and the paper sued or, at the least, maligned. It was paramount that I offer as accurate and fair a summary as possible of both sides, and that I document absolutely everything so that I couldn’t be lied about later on.

First, I started a timeline. This was very helpful later when I began to write. I started with Victoria Yeager’s childhood, listing as I went all the people I would need to speak to to get an accurate picture of her. Then I called the Los Angeles Superior Court and got a full list of cases that had involved her, which turned out to be more extensive than what the Nevada County court records showed. I also checked the Nevada County database for suits she had been involved in there, which yielded still more leads.

I pulled as many court cases as I could get my hands on, which wasn’t easy since I was in San Francisco and the archives were 400 miles away in L.A. Some reporters would simply hop on a plane and fly down for a week or so, and I would have too, except that I have two small children, a husband whose work requires constant travel and no overnight child care that can be relied upon for more than a night at a time. (This is one reason why I became a feature rather than a news writer during these years of child-rearing.)

So, unable to travel, I improvised. You can, too. Using the list of court cases I’d gotten from the court file in Nevada County, plus the list of cases I’d gotten from the public information officer at the LA Superior Court clerk’s office, I started calling around to the pertinent LA County courthouses to confirm where each case was filed. The clerks were very helpful, even over the phone, and in several cases, they pulled the files for me on a promise that someone from the paper would be over soon to make copies. My next step was more difficult – actually finding someone at the paper willing to do that chore.

The Times is a huge paper, but I was told no copy kids or editorial assistants could be spared to go to the courthouse to make copies. My editor got the same brushoff – as a feature section, Calendar was a lower priority for such matters than other parts of the paper. Smaller papers, of course, have no editorial assistants or copy kids at all. So how did we handle this obstacle? We improvised. A friend on the reporting staff made one set of copies; my editor made two more; my husband, who happened to be in Los Angeles on business, made a trip to the bowels of the San Fernando Valley to retrieve a third set.

Each document was a trove. I called the principles in each suit, or, in those where the plaintiff was dead, I called their children. Each had a story to tell. I had our library pull a list of family contacts for Victoria Yeager, figuring that the best way to balance unkind comments about her would be to interview those who were closest to her, but her family members spoke even more harshly about her than the people she sued. Interviews with people she’d claimed to have done deals with in the show business industry made it clear that virtually every statement she made would have to be checked out, since virtually everything she said seemed to be disputed by someone.

Moreover, as the facts of her life and character came into relief on the timeline, it was becoming clearer that I’d really need to press for an interview with Yeager’s kids. I did, and I got lucky – it turned out they regretted having stayed quiet with the other reporters, and were impressed at how much I already knew about their case. With their lawyer as a go-between, I was able to arrange a phone interview with Don Yeager that filled in many of the blanks on their side – and created new angles to be verified.

I put their side of the story into the timeline, too, and finally began to write. And as I read over the facts in order and context, the situation became readily apparent, and so did the psychological motivations of the various players. Here was Yeager’s habit of deferring to women; there was the suspicion and escalating outrage of his daughter and secretary; there, clearest of all, were the lies and distortions of his new wife, along with her clear need to somehow feel important.

More than almost any story I’ve ever written, this was one that could tell itself, in all its complexity, through documented actions, rather than quoted accusations. I started with the couple’s meeting, then flashed back to show the family’s history, the wife’s history, the trajectory of the two coming together, and finally a snapshot of the relationship in real time juxtaposed against the contentions of both sides.

The hardest part, once it was written and submitted to The Times’ lawyer, Karlene Goller, was cutting it to a newspaper-appropriate length.

One note: When the writing was done, I fact-checked. I checked every document and called the lawyers on both sides to make sure their arguments were accurately summarized. I try to do this as often as possible on every story, especially those involving people who don’t deal regularly with reporters – I believe people genuinely yearn to be known, which is why they speak to reporters, but this yearning also makes them feel robbed, in a way, when their views or remarks are misstated in the public record, or placed in a context they didn’t mean.

The downside of this kind of fact-checking is that dishonest people may try to spin you on deadline or persuade you that they didn’t say what they said. The latter likelihood is why God made tape recorders. The former prompted Yeager’s wife to send out an email to a number of his friends, claiming that The Times was planning a hit piece on an American icon, less than a week before publication. About a dozen friends of his called me at home, begging me to spike the feature.

Though I was mildly irritated – this was, after all, a story that had already run in a regional and a national publication, and one that Yeager’s wife had liked when it only carried her side – more information is always better than less. I realized this was my chance to ferret out someone with something nice to say about Victoria Yeager. Unfortunately, it turned out that none of the callers knew her very well – they’d all been led to believe it was Chuck Yeager’s reputation that was in jeopardy, and they had called in his behalf. Still, the barrage yielded one good, balancing quote about his relationship with her (from a fellow pilot who did philanthropy with him), and gave me the chance to be extra-thorough in checking my facts.

Finally, the story was published, with no calls (so far) for retractions or threats of lawsuits. A day later, however, I got an e-mail from Victoria Yeager essentially accusing me of having been paid by Yeager’s children. Her allegation, for the record, is false.

NOW BACK TO THE STORY. AS WE PICK IT UP, SHAWN IS INTRODUCING THE YEAGER KIDS, AND BEGINS TO TAKE US THROUGH THE STORY CHRONOLOGICALLY.

“How did it come to this? That’s a real good question,” Don Yeager said by phone from his Colorado home. “My dad has never been in a lawsuit in his life, nor have any of us kids.” The son, a 58-year-old Vietnam combat veteran who runs a vacation lodge near Powderhorn, Colo., is the eldest of Chuck and Glennis Yeager’s four offspring. Michael Yeager, 57, retired to Springfield, Ore., after a 20-year career in the U.S. Air Force. Sharon Yeager Flick, 55, raises horses in Fallon, Nev. Susan Yeager, now 54, managed her father’s business affairs until the falling-out prompted her to move from the ranch they shared, and where he still lives. She moved to Hawaii in 2003.

“My mom pretty much raised us; my dad was out flying or fighting wars most of the time, but when he was home, he was a great father,” said Don. “We were like the all-American family.” By all accounts, though, Glennis was the linchpin, managing the clan — and its finances — from the lean military years through the prosperity that arose after Wolfe’s history of the space program, “The Right Stuff,” turned Yeager into a pop culture icon.

“Glennis used to laugh and tell me that she controlled everything, that he didn’t even know what he was worth,” recalled Leo Janos, who co-wrote “Yeager,” the famed pilot’s bestselling 1985 autobiography. According to court records, Glennis managed their estate plan, minimizing taxes by making regular cash gifts to their children and grandchildren. She saw to it that Yeager’s book royalties went straight to their children and that his speaking fees, endorsements and other assets were shared via Yeager Inc., a family-owned corporation. When Glennis became ill in 1986 with ovarian cancer, it was she who trained Susan to assume her financial duties.

Then, on Dec. 22, 1990, Glennis Yeager died.

The loss, Chuck Yeager said, was swift and painful, though initially little changed in his life. What had been handled by his wife was now handled by his daughter. His calendar remained filled with hunting trips and speaking engagements. When he finally left the home where he’d retired with Glennis, it was to move to the ranch he had developed with Susan.

“He’d come over to my house to do the mail at 8:30 in the morning at the kitchen table,” said his former secretary, Cindy Siegfried. “Then he’d leave and call in at noon for messages, then head out on his walk, then check in again at 4 in the afternoon.

“Everything was just the same for years, just so predictable. And then all hell broke loose.”

THIS IS WHERE SHAWN BRINGS D’ANGELO INTO THE STORY, A GRACEFUL TRANSITIONAL USE OF THE QUOTE IN THE PREVIOUS GRAF.

Victoria Scptt D’Angelo had been in and out of Nevada County for two years when she met Yeager, and in and out of California for nearly two decades. Her father is a Philadelphia lawyer, as are two of her three brothers. Her late mother was a social worker who gained brief notoriety for persuading former First Lady Betty Ford to go public with her alcoholism. “Tori,” as Victoria was nicknamed, graduated from the University of Virginia in 1980 with a drama degree.

In 1984, she landed a bit part as a female police officer with Harrison Ford in “Witness.” There was a part in “Blades — Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Putt,” a low-budget horror film about a possessed lawn mower. And in a February deposition regarding the Yeager case, she said she appeared in a Jay Leno comedy special, having known him from an acting class they took together. Leno says he doesn’t remember her.

Her show business career not taking off, D’Angelo returned to school for a master’s degree in business administration, taking a job in 1985 with Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, she said. In her deposition, she added that she has not held a full-time job since, and she quit after four months in a dispute over client billings. A spokesman at Mellon said the institution has no record of her employment, or of the lawsuit she says she subsequently filed against them.

Her brother, David D’Angelo, who she said represented her, said he was “not in a position to say anything” about his sister. Other immediate family members also refused to comment. Dale Casey D’Angelo, her father’s ex-wife, said in a phone interview that Victoria had a long history of conflict with her family. In her deposition, Victoria Yeager said she hadn’t spoken to her father or brothers for more than three years.

Eventually, she moved to California, where she would sneak into Hollywood parties in the hope of making industry contacts. This, she said, was how she met the late NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff and ended up in a dispute over an idea she sold to him for $25,000.

When the idea — about a party crasher who witnesses a murder — was turned into a novel in 1998 and she wasn’t acknowledged, she went to the press, though her legal claim had ended with her payment. Tartikoff had died the previous year, leaving a grief-stricken wife and a child who was recovering from severe injuries sustained in a car crash. In a Times story that ran at the time, D’Angelo expressed disbelief at the lack of sympathy she was getting from his lawyers.

She said disillusionment finally led her to drop the matter. “What’s sad is they think the threatening letter is what put me off, when what really just put me off is their lack of integrity,” she said. “And who’s going to bother to sue?”

She would, as it turned out — if not in that instance then in many others. Court records in Los Angeles, Ventura and Nevada counties show more than 30 court cases filed by and against her over the last decade. They range from a small claims suit in which she sued the phone company for static on the line to a personal injury case in which she sued the city of Beverly Hills after falling off a chair in the Police Department.

Her most heated battles, however, involved a series of strikingly similar evictions that date to at least 1995, when she failed to pay rent on an apartment in Santa Monica. That dispute dragged on for months before both she and the landlord won restraining orders (she claimed he harassed her, he claimed she repeatedly threatened his dog’s life). Eventually, she obeyed a court order to move out but records show at least three more such orders in the next three years.

In each case, she rented spare bedrooms from private homeowners who shortly thereafter asked her to move, citing unsettling or bizarre behavior. In each case, she refused to leave until the landlord sought a court order, then denied the allegations and, in all but one instance, attacked the landlord’s character in public court papers.

McDermott, the single mother in Calabasas, for instance, said in court documents that after she asked D’Angelo to stop trying to discipline McDermott’s 12-year-old son or move out, D’Angelo retaliated by harassing her, taping her conversations and telling lies about her and her child to McDermott’s doctors, relatives, neighbors and creditors. When McDermott went to court to request a restraining order, court files show, D’Angelo wrote a 19-page letter to the judge denying the accusations and portraying McDermott as an alcoholic, a drug addict, a bad credit risk and a “psychotic.”

By then, McDermott and her child had moved, asking the judge not to give D’Angelo their new address; at D’Angelo’s request, the subsequent restraining order was again mutual. Another two landladies in Venice, who sold their home out from under D’Angelo after an alleged physical altercation, were similarly disparaged by her in court documents as being “married to an alcoholic” and having “had two to three abortions by [the age of] 21.”

Leavitt said that in her elderly mother’s case, attacks preceded the court case. In 1998, when Lorraine B. DePuy rented a room in her Woodland Hills home to Tori D’Angelo, Leavitt said, D’Angelo “started this psychological campaign, saying all these strange things to my mother about how [DePuy] was all alone in the world and her children didn’t love her — which wasn’t true, we have a very strong, loving family — but it was to the point that my mom just called me, sobbing, one day.”

Leavitt said when she drove to her mother’s home and evicted the tenant, “Tori just turned from this sweet Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, and said, ‘You just try to get me out.’ ” Three days later, according to police reports and the late DePuy’s sworn declaration, D’Angelo shoved the elderly woman against a wall, threatened her with a kitchen chair and kicked her hard in the stomach. DePuy was granted a permanent injunction and D’Angelo was forced out. In an interview, Victoria Yeager denied ever physically attacking anyone and downplayed the court orders.

“A restraining order is just a way for a landlord to get a tenant out,” she said. “And what’s so funny about these restraining orders is that, you look at people like me — and on paper you can say whatever you want — but I had a policeman say, ‘You’re different from them, you settle things with words and they settle things with fists.’ Somebody raises a hand, I’m out the door. Because I can break easily.”

She said it was 1998, shortly after the evictions and the Tartikoff dispute, when she first visited Nevada County on a day trip with an old friend. On a whim, she said, they visited a local woman with whom she had once served as a juror for six days. The woman, she said, was in her 70s and had just had a stroke, and was so grateful for company that she invited D’Angelo to stay with her for a year and “help with rehab.” But she stayed only three months, she said, adding that she couldn’t remember her host’s last name.

She then moved in with Daniel Bertsch, a local disc jockey whom she had by then begun dating, she said, but left within another three months. In court documents, Bertsch, a single father with two small children, said that when he asked her to leave, she refused and became so belligerent that he feared for his family’s safety. Several times, he said, he called the local sheriff’s department to have her removed from his home, though she would always leave before they arrived. His co-workers at KVMR radio said the harassment went on for so long that Bertsch eventually left the station. “She was unrelenting,” said Brian Terhorst, the general manager. “She was making phone calls and being disruptive, and he had young kids. We’re live, and if he was on the air, she knew where he was.”

Not so, says Victoria Yeager.

“When he said I harassed him I was elsewhere,” she said. “And I have all sorts of alibis.”

NOW, THAT TOOK A LOT OF SPACE, BUT YOU NEEDED IT TO UNDERSTAND WHO D’ANGELO IS, SO THAT WHEN SHE AND YEAGER MET, YOU’D UNDERSTAND HOW THEY WOULD AFFECT EACH OTHER. THE NEXT SECTION OF THE STORY LET YEAGER DESCRIBE THEIR MEETING WITH A QUOTE:

“I was comin’ down the trail, and she was goin’ up,” Chuck Yeager recalled, smiling. “And she said, ‘What’re you doin’ on my trail?’ Well, I said, ‘Number one, it’s not yours, and number two’ — anyway, we started talkin’. I was just back from Australia and she was just back from South Africa, I think it was, or New Zealand. You know, she’s traveled all over the world.”

Yeager spoke while walking uphill from his garden, having spent the morning tending tomatoes. His wife entered their green-and-white ranch house several feet ahead. Tall, slim and wearing no makeup, she was dressed in khaki pants and an oversized shirt with a logo for the Gen. Chuck Yeager Foundation, one of several entities they founded together after Yeager’s break with his children.

What drew him to her?

(FOR MY MONEY, THE NEXT GRAF CONTAINS THE BEST QUOTE OF 2004.)

“Oh, horny. Any other questions?” he laughed.

“We went around for, oh, I don’t know, a year and a half. Then I just said, ‘Let’s get married.’ She said OK. We drove up to Incline Village, walked into the courthouse, exactly 28 minutes later walked out married and $105 poorer. Everybody [says], ‘How come you didn’t invite us to your wedding?’ Well, number one, it’s none of their … business. And number two, that’s just the way it was.”

Victoria Yeager said she was on the verge of optioning a book for a television movie when she met her husband. “I walked away from a sure $25,000, although they were doing away with the spirituality of the project anyway, when I met Chuck,” she said. “It was called ‘The Prophetess’ by Barbara Wood — a ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ with spirituality — and I’d sold it to CBS, but a third party was reneging.”

(Wood’s agent and the network executives who heard her pitch all had a somewhat different recollection, saying her proposal went nowhere because she didn’t hold the film rights to the book and yet was demanding a six-figure fee and an executive producer credit. The author herself said she had never heard of the deal or of D’Angelo.)

Victoria Yeager said she didn’t know who Chuck Yeager was when she met him and had to look him up afterward on the Internet. This, too, is disputed. In a deposition, a longtime acquaintance of Yeager said Victoria had openly boasted that she had orchestrated their meeting. Another witness is expected to testify that Victoria posed as a Los Angeles Times reporter at a Nevada County air show in 1999 to gather information on him.

Indeed, almost every aspect of the Yeagers’ love story has lately been questioned, with one exception — his feelings for her.

“Whatever he’s got going with her, I’ve never seen him happier,” said Dan Brattain, an Oregon pilot who has known Yeager for 13 years.

“He follows her around like a lovesick puppy,” agreed Yeager’s son Don. “That’s what’s saddest. He really loves her and she just uses and uses him.”

Yeager says it’s his children who have taken advantage. With his wife next to him, he echoed a charge she made repeatedly in separate interviews and that his children dispute angrily — that they “don’t really work,” and “live off their father’s income.”

“What it boils down to is that when I started runnin’ around with Victoria, what they saw was that I would probably get married and Victoria would inherit my estate,” he said. By the time he met her, he says, he had disbursed so much of his wealth that “the children were spoilt with money.” He estimated that his estate now “is worth maybe $400,000 or $500,000, which isn’t a helluva lot compared to the four or five million the kids have already gotten out of royalties and movie rights and things like that.”

“Ten to 20,” Victoria Yeager interjected.

“What’s that?”

“Ten to 20 million,” she said more loudly, and then: “ten to 20.”

“I don’t know,” Yeager murmured, his brow furrowing. “If so, that’s the top.” In fact, according to court documents filed by his lawyer, Yeager channeled between $65,000 and $100,000 a year in dividends and gifts to each of his grown children, on average, in the dozen or so years between his wife’s death and his second marriage. In 2001, however, Yeager says he informed his children that he wanted to dissolve Yeager Inc. and start a new corporation that would channel future income to his girlfriend.

“The kids didn’t live near,” he said, though later he acknowledged that Susan, at the time, was next door and Don had offered to build him a summer place at his lodge. “They had their own families. I had to solve a problem that would exist as I became older, that nobody was going to take care of me.”

After making some calls to a friend in Los Angeles, Yeager said, he decided he didn’t care about his girlfriend’s past.

“Victoria’s been on her own most of her life,” he said as she sat next to him, her eyes downcast. “And there’s a helluva lot of predators out there that love to prey on exactly what you’re seeing sitting here. Well, when that happens, it’s unfortunate but the majority of gals’ll set back and take it. Victoria doesn’t. She fights back and I admire her for it.”

Don says he and his siblings told their father that they had no intention of abandoning him in his old age but would abide by any decision he made. Their only request, the son said, was that he not take away gifts already given, such as the rights to his autobiography, which various producers have talked about making into a movie.

“We were fine with it,” he said. “We’re not after his money. We just have a birthright. My last name is Yeager. I was raised as Chuck Yeager’s son. If they want to go do their thing and Dad never wants to think of us again, it’s a tragedy but it’s his prerogative. But I’ll be damned if I’ll give back what he’s already given us.”

Yeager and his new wife say in court filings that when he asserted himself, the children “embarked upon a program whereby they sought to take complete control of Gen. Yeager’s assets.” First, they say, Susan used her power as co-trustee to diminish his available cash, channeling money into less liquid investments and making the usual gift distributions without his knowledge.

Then, after the ill will escalated to the point that he suggested she move, Chuck and Victoria say, Susan had the trust buy her out of her home in a way that netted her $624,000 and amounted to illegal self-dealing. “A trustee isn’t supposed to make a profit, it’s that simple,” said Yeager’s attorney, David A. Riegels. In her deposition, Susan denied any malfeasance, saying her actions throughout were above-board.

The children contend matters degenerated as Victoria began openly attacking their reputations, and Yeager moved to take back assets that he had already given to the family.

Copies of e-mails filed in the court record and depositions from Yeager’s associates indicate that, prior to the suit, Victoria was charging in both casual conversations and in business dealings that the children had stolen millions. Meanwhile, court records show, the couple had begun making inquiries about the rights, not to his autobiography, but to his life story, and whether it might be legally construed as a separate asset. Yeager said he also had told his children that he wanted Yeager Inc. to return a tractor he’d earned as a speaking fee from the John Deere Corp., some lithographs and $113,000 he had earned signing model airplanes for the Danbury Mint.

Shortly thereafter, he said, his children voted him from the board of his own family corporation and moved the $113,000 into a bank account he couldn’t access. Yeager then deeded to Victoria half of a condominium that Susan had taken in partial payment for her ranch house, clouding the title. An attempt at mediation fell apart.

When Susan went to court last year to quiet the condominium title, Yeager and Victoria fired back with a cross-complaint charging that Susan had breached her fiduciary duty, escalating matters into the feud that will be heard today. Neither side believes much will be settled by the judge’s ruling.

“As one of Chuck’s friends has said, I could be the woman with the broom, but that’s what Chuck wants,” said Victoria Yeager.

“This isn’t about money — this is about what happens when you get an evil person sticking hand grenades into your family,” Don Yeager acknowledged. “But when this is all over, we’ll be out a father. And they’ll walk out of the courtroom hand in hand.”

Recommended reading: The morning after John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, the New York Times op-ed page published an essay on political speeches by Anna Deavere Smith, an actress and playwright who directs the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University. The piece was stunning for its clarity, perception and integration of acting and writing and race and rhythm. When you mix subjects that rarely seem to touch each other, you create a special power that readers feel. Here ’tis:

SHOW AND TELL
By Anna Deavere Smith

BOSTON — Between going panel to panel, speech to speech, party to party at the Democratic National Convention this week, I called Kenneth Feld, chief executive of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. “What are your criteria for a terrific act?” I asked. “How do you make ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ “? His answer: You get the audience to ask, “How did you do that?” He offered another, crucial element for creating a riveting show; to deliver the unexpected. This year I am tied, gavel to gavel, to the convention and have come to see the show up close, live and in person.

Unlike the circus, the convention hall has no welcoming barker saying “Step right up!” or “This way, folks.” The Fleet Center is barricaded. It’s a little like a fun house. The floors are not insulated, so you hear the pounding of thousands of footsteps moving fast. Wires are exposed along the walls. Hallways seem temporary. Escalators suddenly won’t go up, stairwell doors lock, guards gaze off into space as we ask how to get upstairs. But all of these obstructions melt in the importance of watching the show.

Four years ago, I would have pooh-poohed the notion of politics as theatrical. If theater is anything, it is life made urgent. We don’t waste words, gestures or time on stage. But politicians can learn from us and we can learn technique from them. In this election year, none of us can waste a moment. The theater could afford to be more political and politics needs to be a lot more theatrical.

When Bill Clinton spoke, and dropped the first “Send me” in reference to John Kerry’s decision to go to Vietnam, I was less interested in the comparison between Mr. Kerry and President Bush than in Mr. Clinton’s laying of the groundwork to set the audience on fire with those words. And he did. Yet as I left the FleetCenter (there were barkers shouting instructions on how to get out), my mind was twirling with the words, “How did he do that?”

Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, gave me a clue when I asked if there was any classical actor in America who could have done what Mr. Clinton did that night. “No,” he said. “He is Shavian.

“There is a line from Bill Clinton that extends back through the work of Stoppard and then Shaw and then Shakespeare. One of the things we don’t do is ‘ideate,’ which is how Shakespeare’s characters speak. They don’t go from moment to moment on a rosary, bead to bead. They get the entire idea and then they exhale it.” Got it.

We 20th and 21st century American actors are smitten with the natural, invested in intimacy. We are not trained to grab the hearts and minds of our audience, just the hearts. And speaking of grabbing hearts and minds, we found a new model in Barack Obama. “You think to yourself, ‘Oh, we will all be measured from here on by this. Obama is Brando in ‘Streetcar,’ ” Mr. O’Brien said to me with finality. Mr. Brando did change acting forever with his performance of Stanley, because he was mind, body and heart in a way we hadn’t seen before.

Will Mr. Obama change black political oratory? His speech did not, for example, elicit the traditional call and response we associate with powerful black speech. The speech instead evoked speechlessness. “That guy’s amazing,” said the blond model sitting next to me in the hall. Mr. Obama comes out of a mixed tradition, and I’m not talking about his racial mix. He is mixing traditions of communication. As he himself explained to me: “I tap into the tradition that a lot of African-Americans tap into and that’s the church. It’s the church blended with a smattering of Hawaii and Indonesia and maybe Kansas, and I’ve learned a lot of the most important things in life from literature. I’ve been a professor of law. I’m accustomed to making an argument. When I am effective, it’s coming from my gut.”

If Mr. Clinton goes from Stoppard to Shaw to Shakespeare, does Mr. Obama go from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Langston Hughes, to preachers, to slavery? No, wait. It’s not that simple. Mr. Clinton takes a road that stops off at the black church. Mr. Obama stops off in a literary tradition that we do not immediately associate with black oratory. Is this what Dr. King’s dream was all about? Was it about more than schools and laws? Was it about irresistible fusions, irresistible mixed oratories? Was it about all of us talking to one another and as one another?

Put Mr. Obama’s oratory aside for a moment. What about his magnetism? I asked Tom Freston, the former MTV chief who is now co-president of Viacom: “What makes a real rock star? How do they do that?” He told me, “They have to have a unique attitude, they have to put a twist on a well-worn theme.” Got it.

Mr. Obama’s twist is a twist on the theme of a real, profound desire to get close to the audience, to reach out and seem to be right next to them. It’s so real and so deep that it cannot be taught. In 1996, everyone bemoaned how politics was being turned over to the handlers, the dress designers and the speech coaches. But don’t worry about the handlers in this case. You cannot teach the Clinton-Obama twist.

To what end is the Clinton-Obama twist? Here lies the crux of the matter, and inside the crux we find John Edwards. The most melodic and therefore memorable moment in Senator Edwards’s speech was not just what we came away with, his line that “hope is on the way.” It was the moment when he said, with all his melodies meeting his words: “There will always be heartache and struggle. We can’t make it go away.”

I found it reassuring that the heartache and struggle was seen. It was not denied. Here we find empathy. Perhaps the best of politics and the best of theater seek to reveal the darkness and the light of the human condition, and the worst of both seek power. Hope lives in the politician’s promise of tomorrow, and in the clown’s expectation that eventually truth will out the tyrant. Thank goodness, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards differentiated between blind optimism and hope.This trio prepared a perfect stage upon which Senator Kerry can strut until November.

I think we are moving from one tradition to another. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, I was in the Union Oyster House. It is an old place with wood and tile, festooned in red, white and blue. Three white men in front were giving a briefing. They were very confident, wielding numbers, polls on the right, polls on the left.

When Charlie Cook, a respected political analyst, was asked about young voters, he dismissed them by saying they weren’t worth the time. He divided potential voters into two categories: those who still use cinderblocks and boards to build furniture and those who buy real furniture. The surer bets, Mr. Cook explained, are the ones who buy furniture. Everyone laughed. By all accounts, Mr. Cook knows his numbers, and knows his trends. But he may underestimate the young voters’ potential.

Jessica Tully, a producer at Uma Productions, thinks the election is going to take place on the dance floor. She wants to take hip-hop to the swing states. Sean Combs is at the convention. So is André 3000 of OutKast. They are young and they can afford furniture.

It could be very expensive to stay in old models of the past, old models of who the voters are, where we can spend time and where we can’t. Yet I wouldn’t mind going back to listen to the speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights activist who captivated the crowds at the 1964 convention, and others who know how to mobilize people who have cinderblock furniture or cardboard homes. I want to know about the old days in order to be a part of building the future. I want to know “How did they do that?” Then. And “How can we?” Now.

A feature falls into Bob’s lap…if only he can make the pieces fit

Sometimes a story is a story simply because you will it to be.

Over the course of three months, I bumped into three women trying to make it in show biz who each happened to have come to L.A. from Detroit. The first one, Renie Oxley, came to my attention in a press release from a group promoting women filmmakers. The second, Rita Wallace, simply walked by my desk in the newsroom upon the suggestion of a friend of hers who worked at the L.A. Times. The third, Lynn Isenberg, was also a fluke: When I called a Detroit columnist who had written about Renie two years ago, he told me he’d just done a column on Lynn, who had come back to Detroit for a book-signing.

You know the old joke: two is a pattern, three is a trend. I figured I’d squeeze a trio of mini-profiles into a feature story. It must have been God’s will that I stumbled into this trio, right? I interviewed each woman, but something was missing. I needed them to interact a little. Each was curious about the others, so I invited them to lunch. That worked. But the biggest problem remained: structure. The story had to transition from one biographical section to another with some sense of logic.

It’s the transitions, stupid!

I wound up writing a brief outline over and over. It looked something like this:

INTRO
TRANSITION
WOMAN 1
TRANS
WOMAN 2
TRANS
WOMAN 3

I kept shifting the position of the women to make the story flow right. So, even though Rita was not the most interesting story–I thought Lynn was, as you’ll see–she worked best as Number 1 because of a moment where she and Lynn interact; if the story were a relay race, this would be a moment where Rita passed the baton to Lynn. It was crucial that, with three leading ladies, the story flow effortlessly from the intro, and then from Lady 1 to Lady 2.

Here’s the story, with my additional comments in caps:

GETTING BY ON INDIE DREAMS
By Bob Baker
May 2, 2004

STRAIGHT-FORWARD APPROACH. ONE GRAF TO PUT ‘EM TOGETHER, THEN A GRAF ON EACH

Three women from Detroit — Rita, Lynn and Renie — are having lunch at a budget-busting restaurant, far from where they started out. It’s the first tiime they’ve met, but they’ve got lots to talk about. For anywhere from two to 20 years, they’ve been banging their heads against the same wall, the one called Hollywood.

Rita Wallace, 28, spent four years making her own movie about South Los Angeles roller skaters. She and her two sisters estimated they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from family and friends — but still fell short of a distribution deal. So earlier this spring Wallace rented a Crenshaw district theater that allowedd her to show her film for a week, and declared victory.

Lynn Isenberg, 44, came here to make movies that would force people to reevaluate their lives. But she wound up, for a few weird years, as an iconoclastic adult-film screenwriter — one who cared as much about plot as sex. Today she’s a novelist, promoting a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about a womman whose scripts give porn flicks temporary integrity.

Renie Oxley, 35, who grew up five miles from Isenberg, gave up a $115,000-a-year law gig to throw the dice here. She made the choice after she fell in love with a quirky Detroit bar and spent half a year’s salary making a well-received documentary about life inside the tavern. In Detroit, she had employed a secretary. In L.A., she began her new life by becoming one, then hooked a small-time director’s job.

NEXT IN THE INTRO I HAD TO TELL YOU WHERE THEY FIT ON THE HOLLYWOOD FOOD CHAIN:

Odds are you will never hear about any of these Michiganders again. But have lunch with them and you’ll appreciate why they, and so many others, blissfully ignore those odds. Anonymous as they remain, as much rejection as they’ve absorbed, they’re still tangible proof that the skeptics back home were wrong, that you can simply come west and dive into the struggle — even if the best they can say about you is that you’re no longer unsuccessful. Even if you’re reduced to working out of your apartment, or your neighborhood cafe or, in Wallace’s case, out of your ’78 Beetle convertible, stuffed with movie posters and clothes.

THIS COMMENT BY RITA WAS A NICE MOMENT THAT SET THE TONE

“I dreamed of being in this big office,” Wallace tells the others, who’ve been brought together at the Pacific Dining Car by a reporter who bumped into them individually over the last few months. Wallace laughs at her dream. “This big office with a window overlooking the city. But instead, I got a front windshield I’m looking out of.” She pulls out a photocopy of a recent newspaper listings ad for Magic Johnson Theaters in Crenshaw — where her film, “Roller Wheelz,” played next door to “The Passion of the Christ” and “Barbershop 2″ — and beams to her new acquaintances: “This is my Academy Award, guys!”

WITH THAT, WE MOVE INTO THE RITA SECTION. I WROTE ABOUT 18-20″ ON EACH WOMAN. I FELT I WAS SQUEEZING FAIRLY HARD TO COMPRESS A LOT OF MATERIAL, BUT THAT I HAD GIVEN MYSELF ENOUGH ROOM FOR SOME GOOD DETAIL. COULD I HAVE SQUEEZED EACH SECTION TO 10-12″? SURE. BUT I TOLD MY BOSS I THOUGHT THIS WAS WORTH 75″ AND SHE BOUGHT IT.

Wallace came here, in a sense, to vindicate her mother’s failed dreams. Mom was a teenage beauty contest winner. With her husband and four children, she drove to L.A. in the mid-’70s to pursue a career in acting. “The whole family in this ol’ beat-up Cadillac,” Wallace remembers. “Thinkin’ ‘We’re gonna make it big.’ “Mom signed up with a self-styled talent agent who could not deliver what he promised. Four years later, the family gave up and drove back to Hamtramck, a small blue-collar city surrounded by Detroit.

By the late ’80s, when Wallace was in her teens, they moved back to L.A. After graduating from Hamilton High in West L.A., she got some small acting parts and production-assistant work. In the late ’90s she took film classes and started writing a script she figured she’d produce: a good-time “urban” family story — no sex, drugs or violence. She’d seen the mothers crying in “Boyz N the Hood” and wanted to evoke something closer to her childhood of roller skating from home at 54th and Western into Hollywood. “Roller Wheelz” is a hip-hop comedy set around an L.A. radio station skating contest with a $5,000 prize that attracts a gaggle of desperate kids.

Wallace knocked on the doors of a few studios and got turned down — in one case, she says, because there wasn’t any violence to give the picture so-called “street cred.” It became inevitable this would be a do-it-yourself project. She had few resources but her optimism, some contacts in the business, two older sisters with credit cards and a slew of relatives. (Her mom was the oldest of 15 siblings, and one set of grandparents in Macon, Ga., had a total of 35 brothers and sisters between them.) Her sisters, Ernestine, 40, and Corzann, 36, urged her on.

She wanted to cast a few kids from popular TV shows, but could not get her calls returned. So she says she spent $4,000 to rent a rehearsal hall at Paramount for one day simply to have a recognizable phone prefix. That, she says, got her some callbacks and, eventually, actors like Antwon Tanner from “Boston Public” and Shar Jackson of “Moesha.” Small loans or gifts from family members and friends allowed her to rent cameras and other equipment. Corzann helped write and produce. Ernestine, who’d worked as a costumer for TV productions, became costume designer and associate producer.

They saved money by rehearsing the cast at the beach, convincing landmarks like Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘n’ Waffles to let them shoot there, borrowing cars, purchasing wigs at party stores. They filmed in just two weeks. It would be a year before editing was done, and another year before Wallace “four-walled” her film at Magic’s cinema — simply renting one auditorium for a week. Even there she was snakebit: A Crenshaw district power outage cost her a day and a half of box office. She broke even.

Wallace, who lives in an El Segundo apartment with her 12-year-old son, now plans to head for Texas, Ohio and Tennessee to try to get her film screened there. The movie is cute in some places, ragged in others. But none of that mattered to Wallace one day in late March when she walked into the theater complex with a couple dozen others, took a seat in the second row for the 4:45 p.m. show and, a large bag of popcorn on her lap, watched her movie with an L.A. audience for the first time. There it was on the screen: “A Rita Wallace Film.” “I feel like a kid on Christmas Day,” she beamed.

HERE COMES THE TRANSITION TO LYNN. I CONVINCED MYSELF IT WAS JUST AS WELL TO HAVE THE MOST INTERESTING PROFILE AS #2 BECAUSE IT WOULD GIVE THE STORY A SENSE OF PROPULSION

A couple of weeks later, she is telling this story to her fellow Michiganders. “Rita,” the reporter suggests, “you ought to make a movie about somebody like you making a movie like that.

“Which gets Lynn Isenberg’s attention. Because that, in essence, is what she did.

Isenberg had a dozen advantages over Wallace — more education, more experience in Hollywood’s creative and business communities, more contacts — and Hollywood still tookk her dream and, like a tornado, blew it in another direction.

She’d loved writing as a child. She grew up in white-collar Bloomfield Hills, went to the University of Michigan, majored in English and film studies and headed to L.A. in the early 1980s to become a screenwriter and producer. She got a job with the literary arm of Creative Artists Agency, got an associate producer credit on the Lawrence Kasdan comedy “I Love You to Death,” and worked on her own screenplays.

She also fell in love with a cult-favorite novel about friendship and loss, Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s “Disturbances in the Field.” She optioned it several times at a total cost of about $50,000 and set about developing it for the screen. It would be the first project she controlled from start to finish. “I really thought that it would help people deal with grief; the whole reason I became a writer was to help inspire people, to give them another way of seeing.”

But she could never close the deal: The well-known actress who loved it backed off in favor of a new project; the Oscar-winning screenwriter she’d lined up had to return to another film at a producer’s insistence; the nonlinear screenplay was, she suggests, ahead of its time.

After five years of reversals she was running out of money. So she called an old Detroit friend who had worked at PBS but was now with the Playboy Channel. Write me a soft-core script, he said. She responded with what became known as “Things Change,” the story of a lesbian who leaves her female partner to explore her sexual identity — a story based on imagination, not personal experience, she emphasizes.

Unbeknownst to her, Playboy co-financed the script with an adult-film company, which made a far more explicit version. (No extra speaking parts needed, just more sex.) Also unbeknownst to her, the film’s relatively sophisticated dialogue got considerable attention in the adult-film world and numerous nominations in the annual Adult Video News competition. “It allows its characters a dignity heretofore unequaled in adult entertainment,” one reviewer said in 1993. Isenberg was asked to write another script. And another. (All were done under an Italian pseudonym too gynecological to be translated here.) She negotiated her own four-picture deal with another adult-film company, making $2,500 to $5,000 per script. She cast and wrote an explicit sex-ed video for couples. She was, at different times, appalled by what she was doing and determined to go with the flow. “This was where I was at this moment in time. I was going to be open-minded … I let go of control.”

Isenberg kept telling a fellow writer about her experiences, and the friend, who found them hysterical, kept prodding her to turn them into a novel. After she quit porn scripting in 1996, Isenberg went back to Detroit and knocked out “My Life Uncovered” in a couple of months. Her protagonist, Laura Taylor, loses her dream screenplay deal when her agent vanishes and she accepts an adult-entertainment offer to pay her bills. Like Isenberg, Laura tries to reconcile the gulf between her ambitions and her new career as she listens to her rabbi’s Shabbat morning services. Like Isenberg, Laura pens an introspective line of dialogue about her inability to trust men that, when her father sees the film, helps heal the estrangement between them.

The first publisher Isenberg approached, Toronto-based Red Dress Ink, which specializes in “chick lit,” bought the novel and printed an initial run of 50,000 copies in December. The book has enjoyed favorable Internet reviews (as well as applause from the Jewish Journal). Isenberg says she is sifting through TV and film adaptation offers while working on her next novel.

Funny, she tells the other women from Detroit, she came to Hollywood to be a filmmaker and wound up the novelist she’d wanted to be at 8. They agree publishing is less barbaric. Like an agent once told her, Isenberg says, “the difference is, in Hollywood they want to kill you; in the publishing business, they just get bitchy.” Funny, too, how you wind up paying homage to your elders. Isenberg tells them that a great aunt was an author, and that next month she’ll return to Bloomfield Hills to address an annual meeting of immigrants from her great aunt’s native town, David Horodok, in what is now Belarus.

“You’re living her dream,” says Wallace, who knows the feeling.

With a twist. “When they asked me,” Isenberg says, “I said, ‘Maybe I should talk about storytelling, and how traditional storytelling carries on … ‘ and the woman on the phone said, ‘No, you don’t understand. You have to talk about porn. They’re expecting it. I think we’re gonna have the biggest turnout yet.’ ”

People tell Isenberg, who is single, that, despite her Detroit roots, she reminds them of a New Yorker, in a Sarah Jessica Parker-as-Carrie Bradshaw way. And the image fits as she puts a copy of “Things Change” into her Marina del Rey condo’s DVD and tries to locate a moment of dialogue between the two female stars that she’s proud of. She has to keep skipping around, and every time she does there’s — whoops — another graphic sex scene. “Oh God,” she apologizes earnestly to her guest, “I’m so sorry.”

I TRIED AND I TRIED TO FASHION A TRANSITION FROM LYNN TO RENIE, BUT THEY ALL FELT STILTED. SO I SIMPLY CUT TO RENIE, FIGURING THE READER HAD BEEN WELL PREPARED. I SAVED HER FOR LAST BECAUSE HER REFLECTION ON HER CAREER WAS GOOD AND SEEMED TO WORK AS AN ENDING.

Renie Oxley, living her second year in L.A., has met a potential manager who urges her to ask a reporter not to disclose her age. She thinks it over and rejects the advice. She is who she is. Plus, how old is 35? This is one of the differences between Hollywood and the Midwest. “I feel like I spent my 20s fitting in, compromising,” she says. “When I moved out here I said, ‘I’m not going to compromise.’ This has been 10 times harder than I expected. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s also the most fun.”

She, like Isenberg, grew up in Bloomfield Hills, the daughter of an architect and a teacher now retired. One sister is an interior designer, the other works in a personnel department. Oxley went to an all-girl Catholic school, then Michigan State University and law school. All the while, the film buff inside was trying to break out.

She clerked for a judge, then joined a law firm and did trial work, then took a job as a utility company attorney that offered relatively cushy hours. It was here that Oxley made “my deal with God”: She promised to use her newfound spare time to become a filmmaker.

She made a couple of shorts and took film classes, then set her sights on a documentary about an opera singer. Then one night in 1999 the singer took Oxley into a bar in a deteriorating section of Michigan Avenue on Detroit’s west side, where Oxley met the crusty owner, Irene Kress, reportedly the first woman in Michigan to obtain a liquor license — back in 1937. Kress was still holding court in a bar that resembled a ’40s museum, so little had changed. Nude paintings off women — some believed to be Irene — lined the walls.

Oxley’s 47-minute “Irene’s Last Call,” made with a $10,000 grant and $50,000 of her own money, captured an untold piece of feminist history and showed how life in a bar can virtually stand still if the patrons and the owners will it so. Oxley also got a plot break: Months after she’d finished shooting and was editing her work, Kress and her husband fell ill, sold the bar to an automotive dealership that wanted the land for a parking lot and moved to Florida. The already poignant documentary had a heartbreaking ending: bulldozers demolishing the bar.

Oxley rented a Detroit theater for two nights to show her film, entered it in some festivals and moved here, landing the proverbial mailroom job with International Creative Management, then becoming a secretary there. She sent copies of “Irene’s Last Call” around; one of them landed in the hands of Amit Vaidya, who was about to produce a $300,000 film about a classically trained Indian American singer who encounters musical and cultural tensions while competing in an “American Idol”-like contest. Vaidya, impressed by her storytelling skill, gave Oxley her first paying director job.

Oxley splits her time between the directing gig and writing a screenplay modeled on “Irene’s Last Call.” She rents an apartment in the Silver Lake district. (“I used to wonder, ‘What are all these young people doing in the coffee shop at 10:30 in the morning?’ Then I realized: They’re all writers.”) She’s still trying to break the news to her parents that this is a permanent move.

HERE COMES THE ENDING

The words she uses come from the same part of the heart that Isenberg’s pronouncement came from in the ’80s and Wallace’s came from in the ’90s when friends in Detroit wondered if they’d embarked on a true quest, or just a lark. It’s the part of the heart that fights off rejection, that vows, as Wallace does, “The more they say ‘no,’ the more I love it. ‘Cuz the guys who say ‘yes’ don’t come through anyway. They just say ‘yes’ to get you off the phone.”

“My parents ask me at least every other week when am I coming home,” Oxley says. “When am I done with this little adventure? And I don’t feel done at all.”

Bob co-authors the autobiography of the R&B deejay who enthralled him as a kid

Look, I gotta tell you this story. It’s not much about journalism. It’s more about my life. I offer it now to celebrate the publication of a book that started in my 12th-grade chemistry class 38 years ago.

'Burn! Baby! BURN!'

It happened because one day the kid next to me was telling the kid next to him about a disc jockey–a black disc jockey–who was screaming like a man possessed, playing all these great rhythm and blues songs that the white stations never played. This was the Fall of 1965, and in my part of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, at a high school where maybe three of the three thousand students were black, this was extremely hip information. “Magnificent Montague!” one of the boys kept saying. “You gotta hear Montague!”

I tuned in the next morning before school–KGFJ, 1230 on the AM dial, a distant journey from “Boss Radio,” the carefully formatted home of the Beatles and Beach Boys at 930–and there it was, this dynamic parallel universe, full of people I’d never heard of, like B.B. King and Johnnie Taylor and JJ Jackson. It was full of rough, hidden classics by black artists whose full brilliance never crossed over to white radio: Otis Redding’s “Mister Pitiful” or The Contours’ “First I Look At The Purse,” which I still remember giggling at the first time I heard it. (” . . . If the purse is fat/that’s where it’s at!”)

About the only black music I’d heard before was the more tepid sounds of Motown or Brook Benton or Diana Washington or the country-and-western style of Ray Charles But what really froze me with delight was Magnificent Montague himself. He was feverishly shouting or screaming, like he thought he was one of the artists-and damned if he wasn’t.

There was real-life drama here: Coming in as a listener shortly after the Watts Riots, I was able to infer that Montague once had a favorite expression that he used, and the listeners would call in and scream it: “Burn, baby! Burn!” This subculture, with so much urgency and mystery, pulled me along, left me ever-wondering: What was Montague going to do on the air today? What were his callers going to bring to the table? Because his show felt like it was the most important thing in his life, it became the most important thing in my bleak social existence. It made me want to wake up in the morning.

A few months after I started listening to Montague, I graduated high school and started attending a state college down the street from home. I’d sit in my parents’ ’59 Rambler station wagon a half-hour before class, transfixed by the show. There were 25,000 students on that campus the year I showed up, 98% of them white. I had no friends there that first semester and I did not know anyone who listened to what I was hearing. It was mine, mine alone–for about a year and a half. Then, in the Spring of ’67, Montague left KGFJ, for whereabouts unknown. I stopped listening. I probably would have anyway: One afternoon around that time, I heard both Jimi Hendrix and the protest singer Phil Ochs for the first time at a friend’s apartment and soul music’s lure began to fade.

I graduated college and became a newspaper reporter. In the early ’70s, Montague showed up again, briefly, on a station broadcasting out of Mexico, working with Wolfman Jack. It seemed like that gig lasted a year or so, and then Montague faded completely into a romantic memory, something that, on the occasions I pondered it, made me wonder if he could really have been as magnificent as I remembered.

Bruce Springsteen was the most important guy in my world in 1985 when I realized the 20th anniversary of the Watts Riots was approaching. I was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, trying to think of an anniversary idea, and “What happened to . . . ” popped into my head. I walked over to my city editor and started telling him about this crazy deejay who had coined “Burn, baby! Burn!” on the radio before the riots. It was all news to my boss. Sure, he said, tell the story.

I called KGFJ and got lucky. The veteran station exec who answered the phone had worked with Montague and, all this time later, knew where he was: On the air in Palm Springs. I called Montague and explained that I was an authentic former fan, now armed with the capacity to tell his whereabouts to a million newspaper readers.

“I’m not interested,” he said. “Don’t like to talk about the past.” Eventually, he budged. I was invited to drive to Palm Springs. There’s a moment near the end of “American Graffiti” when Richard Dreyfus’ character finally meets the town’s popular deejay, played by Wolfman Jack, and realizes that he’s not black, but a pudgy Popsicle-licking white guy. Montague was black, all right, but what stunned me, in much the same way as that movie scene, was how slight he was–maybe 5-foot-5, built like a featherweight boxer. How could that booming sound have come out of this man?

Twenty years later, it still pained Montague to confront the way “Burn, baby! Burn” had become the theme song of the Watts riots, and so many other subsequent societal outbursts. It was, he tried to tell me, the perversion of something perfect that had transpired unconsciously between him and his listeners. “The words didn’t make them burn,” he said cautiously. “The words were already there. I just put together the melody.”

Gradually, he warmed up, until it started to pour out of him. You have to understand how I came up, he said, how hard I had to work, how I learned to sell ads on radio, and then to sell myself. How I learned to become as large as the artist whose record I was playing. “Burn, baby! Burn!,” he said, “meant that when I’m playing the record and I am snapping my fingers and I’m talking my talk, I have reached the epitome, the height–there is no more you can do!” His words came faster. “Everything is up, up, up! And that’s when”–he momentarily softened his voice for drama–”you burn, baby–burn. It is like the high-five. You know you’ve hit your home run. There’s no more to say. You look at the ball go, like Reggie Jackson. And when I hit that record and I say, ‘Darling, I love you,’ or ‘Put your hand on the radio and touch my heart,’ bop-bop-bop BURN, Baby! Burn–there was no more to say! That was the epitome! That was it!”

A few years after the article ran, I got another call from Montague. He’d sold the radio station and moved back to Los Angeles, he explained, and wondered if I would take a look at his collection.

Of what?

Books, he said. Paintings. Pamphlets. Movie posters. Engravings. Black. It’s all black.

I drove over to his apartment and he told me the story about how he’d fallen in love with collecting African American memorabilia. There were thousands and thousands of pieces of it in a warehouse in El Monte, a suburb of Los Angeles, he told me. He wanted me to help him find a way to turn it into a black history museum.

I was confused. Why would a man whose persona was clearly built on living for the moment turn into a history collector? I didn’t realize how long he’d been doing this. I wrote another story, and my newspaper published it.

A few years after that Montague called me again, and our conversations led to the notion that perhaps the two sides of his life could be a book. In 1992, we started a series of interviews which would continue off and on for several years, interrupted by his radio consulting jobs, my reporting and editing work and several unfulfilling encounters with a publishing industry that wanted an autobiography that fell into one predictable category. This infuriated Montague. “I am not simply a deejay!” he’d say, and the book that resulted, published in October, 2003 by University of Illinois Press, is testament to that. It spits in the face of the marketing niches that make popular culture so sterile. It’s the story of a complicated man who is both fiercely proud of the little-known accomplishments of his race and disdainful of a society that has attempted to define him by limiting him to a racial box. He wants you to know him as more than a black man–or a deejay.

The longer we worked on the manuscript, the more both of us understood what the book should sound like. It should sound like his show on KGFJ, or on WWRL in New York before that, or on WAAF in Chicago before that: a long, on-the-air rap about the glory of music and the glory of tracking down historical achievement.

Montague’s recollections swooped from era to era, creating fragments of a monologue that would eventually be glued together. I began supplementing his stories with research on the personalities whose paths he crossed. I was fortunate in that Montague, like all collectors, was a pack rat. He still had the printed speech of Paul Robeson from a half-century ago. He still had the poster advertising one of his huge New York soul concerts from four decades past. He still had a tape of an on-air conversation with Sam Cooke. He still had the surrealistic novel he’d written in the early ’60s about a black boy’s encounter with scores of legendary black achievers.

Montague moved to Las Vegas in the mid-’90s, so our collaboration began taking place largely by telephone. For several years he grew more concerned about turning his history collection into a Los Angeles museum than telling his story. When the museum plan fell thorough due to a lack of financial support, the book regained primacy in his life.

So behold a hybrid: an entertaining American history book that’s also an American history-soaked entertainment book. And enjoy, as I do, the realization that those whimsical moments in high school sometimes lead you places you never imagined.

Reprinted from “Burn, Baby! BURN! The Autobiography of Magnificent Montague,” published in October, 2003 by the University of Illinois Press.

Want more? Go to www.magnificentmontague.com. You can find links to order the book and also find audio clips of Magnificent Montague’s theme song and other performances.

Fearful of losing his readers, our hero stoops to parody

During California’s gubernatorial recall, a local writer with a national reputation, Micky Kaus, recorded a couple of minor scoops about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rowdy youthful days. Kaus used to write for cerebral publications like the New Republic, but for the past several years he has been expressing himself primarily on his blog, kausfiles.com.

Blogging the blogger

I’m no expert on the Web but I have a weird job title in the L.A. Times’ Features department called “popular culture” writer, and the editors figured this was a fit. Would I please snap out a profile of this guy in a couple days?

Kaus was easy to reach, accessible; his writing was all there on the Web for me to research. Not much elbow grease there. The trick was: How to make somebody want to read a story about a goddamn writer. Who cares about somebody harrumphing to maybe 15,000 readers a day?

I needed a novelty, a gimmick—something that would make me believe people would actually read this, or least get past the first paragraph.

So I decided to write the story the way Kaus (and many bloggers) write their Web sites—longer paragraphs, a certain breeze indulgence, smart-ass bold-faced headlines to begin each section. Maybe I’d inject my favorite cheeseburger place.

Technically, I couldn’t make this a real blog—couldn’t time-date each posting, couldn’t put the first sections at the bottom—but I figured some people would get it, and other people would enjoy the breeziness for its own sake. (After this ran an editor said: You oughta structure every story like that. My heart be still.)

See what you think. Anything else I have to say will be in caps:

HE’S CHIEF OF THE IRE DEPARTMENT
By Bob Baker
September 20, 2003

THE IDEA WAS TO MAKE THE FIRST GRAF GO ‘BANG!’ SO THE SECOND SENTENCE ANSWERED THE QUESTION. THE THIRD SENTENCE DREW OUT THE CONTRADICTION OF KAUS’ PAST AND PRESENT. SPRINKLE A LITTLE OF HIS ENVIRONMENT AND HIS SUPPORT OF THE RECALL.

Guess who’s leaning toward Arnold? That liberal-bashing liberal Mickey Kaus, for two decades a respected voice on weightier matters of social policy. Kaus’ demanding intellect has filled the pages of the New Republic and Newsweek, but these days he plies his trade online at kausfiles.com, a daily blog full of punchy boldface headlines, cocksure analysis and occasional self-indulgent rants. He jokes that this means “no deadlines and no editors in exchange for no money and no readers.” But the truth is, his sponsor, slate.com, pays him enough to live in a comfy if sparsely furnished single-guy apartment in Venice, and anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 people visit kausfiles.com daily. The site has been particularly perky lately because of Kaus’ coverage of the ever-changing California gubernatorial recall, which, unlike most Democrats, he supports.

NOW TO THE SCOOPS:

Does anyone smell a contradiction here? Kaus says he’ll probably vote for Schwarzenegger if the Republican performs well during the remainder of the campaign. Yet Kaus has undercut his candidate twice in recent weeks with scoops casting doubt on Schwarzenegger’s morality, veracity or both. It was Kaus who first posted the existence of a 1977 Oui magazine interview in which Mr. Universe boasted of engaging in group sex at Gold’s Gym in Venice. Schwarzenegger now claims he made up the incident to get attention. (Headline on kausfiles.com: “Schwarzenegger’s Defense: ‘I’m a Huge Liar!’ “) And it was Kaus who last week was first to describe a tape of Schwarzenegger’s 1981 appearance on “The Tonight Show” in which he told how he and a fellow bodybuilder intentionally damaged chimneys to increase their bricklaying business (“KF Global Exclusive — Arnold’s Home Repairs”).

NOW TO THE THESIS. YOU’LL NOTICE THAT SOME OF THESE BOLD-FACED PRECEDES ACT AS HEADLINES, WHILE OTHERS ARE PART OF THE ACTUAL TEXT. IN RETROSPECT THAT MAY HAVE BEEN CONFUSING. I DIDN’T THINK IT THROUGH.

Which raises the question: Could somebody please make sense of Mickey Kaus? Why is a high-level thinker (his 1992 book “The End of Equality” was praised as a refreshing exploration of why traditional liberalism could never resolve poverty) playing on the Web? Why is a Harvard Law School graduate using so many exclamation points (some sardonic, some earnest) in his postings? How are we supposed to differentiate between his attacks on Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and the Los Angeles Times poll and the New York Times’ economic coverage and Sen. John Kerry and a meandering tongue-in-cheek scenario in which Schwarzenegger’s election as governor leads to a shadow presidency, with Maria Shriver actually running for the office?

HERE COMES THE SELF-INDULGENCE

Before wrestling with that question…. Did you know you can get the greatest bacon-pastrami cheeseburger at Blue Cube, a little coffee shop across the street from The Times?

Here’s the answer: The Web is now so ubiquitous that a 52-year-old pundit can find a substantial, satisfying audience of civic-minded people who will adopt him as part of their daily routine. (Only a few years ago, Kaus went to the 30th reunion of his Beverly Hills High class. A classmate asked him what he was doing. “I have a Web site,” Kaus said. “My daughter does too,” the classmate said.) The Web is a perfect place for a brainy, iconoclastic dart-thrower. Since he started kausfiles.com in 1999, Kaus has mused eloquently on everything from campaign finance reform to Israel to the 2000 Florida recount to a dispute over writing credits on “The West Wing.” He has become part of the front line of pundit-bloggers, along with Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic conservative, and Glenn Rey- nolds, a University of Tennessee law professor with catholic tastes. “I have a pretty easy life,” he says, maybe 6 1/2 hours a day reading and typing, and the beach waiting a mile away.

HERE’S THE RAP ON HIM, AND A CHANCE TO GO DEEPER INTO HIS POLITICAL VIEWS. THE SECTION ENDS WITH A SLIGHT MENTION OF HIS PERSONALITY SO THAT THE NEXT SECTION CAN PLAY OFF THAT. AS I CONSTRUCT THIS STORY I AM HIGHLY CONSCIOUS OF THE NEED TO KEEP IT MOVING, TO GIVE THE READER A SENSE OF BEING PULLED ALONG AS MUCH BY THE NARRATOR AS BY HIS INTEREST IN KAUS.

Hard-core liberals are glad you’re happy, Mickey, but they ding you … for being a Democrat who focuses only on the misjudgments and hypocrisies of other Democrats, not Republicans. Why not just join the GOP? they snort. “Maybe it’s a character defect,” Kaus answers without rancor, “but when I get up in the morning I do not feel like attacking George Bush” — not because he’s drawn to Bush but because he expects so little. He is, by contrast, obsessed with what he sees as the failure of liberalism. He envisions an activist government that champions not financial redistribution but programs that encourage “social equality” (examples: some scheme of national service for draft-age Americans, universal health care). In person he is self-effacing and good-humored — no sign of the smugness some intellectuals throw off.

THIS SECTION GAVE ME A CHANCE TO QUOTE FROM SOME OF HIS MORE INSIGHTFUL WRITING

But something changes around 10 each night. That’s when Kaus walks into a small unkempt office in his apartment and begins surfing tomorrow’s newspapers and tonight’s blogs, looking for developments that stir him. He composes in a writing voice that is harsher than his spoken one — demanding, impatient. At his best, Kaus cuts to the heart of the matter. Like the time he got angry at former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who had just admitted that his squad killed many unarmed women and children during the Vietnam War. “There is already entirely too much respectful attention being paid to the moral and psychological agony of Bob Kerrey and to the ‘healing process,’ ” he wrote. “The question is what happened to the people who haven’t had the luxury of agonizing for 32 years because they’ve been dead. Kerrey’s agony is a distraction.”

THAT DONE, I COULD GO EVEN DEEPER INTO HIS WRITING ON A PARTICULAR SUBJECT

You know what really ticks Mickey off? The New York Times. The scandal over Jayson Blair’s phony stories, which led to the departure of arrogantly brilliant Executive Editor Howell Raines, was cathartic entertainment to Kaus. He blamed Raines and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for an increase in liberal bias in the paper’s articles and headlines. Its coverage of economics frosts him. (The New York Times is determined to make the nation’s economy look worse than it is, he claims — “it’s an institutional need, it’s a partisan need and it’s sort of a left-wing anti-capitalist need.”) Last year, hours after the paper ran a front-page story suggesting that the 1996 welfare reform law resulted in rising numbers of urban children living apart from their parents, kausfiles.com screamed intellectual dishonesty. ” ‘No parent household’ or ‘urban children living without a parent’ makes you think these children are running around in empty houses without adult supervision, which they aren’t. They’re typically raised by their grandparents, which … can be a good thing — if, say, their mother is a crackhead whose problems were only smoked out when she was required to seek work.”

SMALL SECTION ON SOME OF HIS MORE ECLECTIC OPINIONS

Even Pete Yorn isn’t safe: Kaus railed against the term “homeland” when the new federal department was created: “It explicitly ties our sentiments to the land, not to our ideas.” He complained that the popularity of singer Yorn, whose work left him cold, was evidence of the evils of conglomerate control of radio. He started publishing summaries of newspaper series, contending that they were overwrought and overwritten and undertaken only to win prizes. He was so contemptuous of one Los Angeles Times series — a four-part examination of how the media covers Hollywood — that he instructed readers to avoid even his summary of it.

THIS WAS A SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT ON MY PART, BUT I CAN DO IT BECAUSE I’M A PSUEDO-BLOGGER, AND IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR YOU’RE NOT GOING TO QUIT. PLUS, WHEN I ASKED HIM ABOUT MY PERCEPTION OF HIS GRUMPINESS, HE AGREED WITH IT.

Allegation: Sourpuss! Many Kaus postings these days sound, well, grumpy. The Los Angeles Times, in particular, suffers his wrath nearly every day for recall coverage that Kaus dismisses as soft, politically correct, late or tilted toward Bustamante or Davis. He has engaged in discourses about the technical reasons the Los Angeles Times poll shows Davis with more support than other polls do, suggesting at least the appearance of bias. He warned readers a week early that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals might delay the recall and, when it happened, Kaus described the mind-set behind the ruling as “condescending, museum-quality” and “paleo- liberal.” He was offended by the appeals court’s belief that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 Bush-Gore ruling could be applied here: “In Bush v. Gore, [the court] was confronted with a state court ruling that allowed, not different voting systems in different counties, but two completely different recounting systems within a single county…. Worse, one of the systems was obviously more permissive.”

Sourpuss pleads guilty! “I have been very cranky lately,” Kaus says with no trace of guile. “I used to be funny and now I’m angry and I can’t explain it. I’ve become crankier, and I hope it’s a phase that passes. It could be recall related, it could be I just lost a groove I had, a whimsical quality that’s in remission.” With that, he laughs. “I am defensive for California in the sense that I’m reacting against all the East Coast pundits and the L.A. Times for saying this is an embarrassment to California. The recall provisions are flawed, but there’s still a lot of good that’s coming out of this.”

WE ARE OBLIGATED TO FOCUS IN ON HIS SUPPORT FOR ARNOLD. WE JUST DIDN’T HAVE TO DO IT VERY HIGH. THIS ALSO ALLOWS US TO GO DEEPER INTO THE SUPPORT-VERSUS-SCOOPS QUESTION.

What’s Arnold got that Cruz doesn’t? Kaus answers with Spanish slang for “guts.” He is drawn to Schwarzenegger as a fiscal conservative who is liberal on many social issues. “I’d like a governor who can cut spending by telling lobbyists, including union lobbyists and lawyers, ‘no.’ Schwarzenegger has at least the potential to do that — and thanks to the Constitution we don’t have to worry much about him using the state as a springboard to becoming president.” He dismisses Bustamante as a panderer lacking the courage to condemn illegal immigration from Mexico. Yet when you ask Kaus what his two Schwarzenegger scoops say about his man, he says: “The commonality is that one of his character flaws is that he tends to see people as marks, people he can con with various scams … and that could be tied together with his reputation as somebody who bullies people below the line on the movie set. It’s troubling. For all Schwarzenegger’s flaws, I still tend to think I would vote for him. [But] I am not so pro-him that I don’t want all the dirt to come out.”

I NEEDED TO DO SOME BIO. I WASN’T ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT IT. I HAD TO USE A PUN HEADLINE. I AM NOT PROUD OF THAT.

Venice is nothing to sneeze at: We have allergies to thank for Kaus’ presence here. Raised on the Westside (his father was the late state Supreme Court Justice Otto Kaus), he went to Harvard, wrote for Washington Monthly, revered for its contrarian essays on liberal governance, then went to the New Republic. He first dabbled with an Internet column in 1997 for slate.com, after ceasing work on a novel. He moved between the coasts a couple times in the ’90s, most recently returning in 2001, finding that the allergies that plagued him lessened the closer he got to the beach.

THE ENDING, TOO, IS MEDIOCRE, SETTLING FOR A QUOTE, BUT IT HAD THE ADVANTAGE OF SELF—CHARACTERIZATION.

Mickey thinks you should have a blog. “Everybody should,” he says. “I’ll never want to give that up. There will always be ideas you have that nobody else does that you want to get out. Do I want to keep posting three hours a day for the rest of my life? I don’t think so. I’ll want to stop it. But why stop it while it’s still fun?”

I can hear some of you now: “My editor would never let me…” I admit, I’m lucky enough to work for people who don’t blink at a cheap trick like this. But you don’t always have to get the whole loaf. Maybe one element within this story can be swiped and duplicated (or, certainly, improved). You earn the right to fool around like this, and it takes time. Be ambitious, be patient–how’s that for a contradiction?

Read Steve Rubenstein’s feature for what’s not there

Every once in a while you find lessons in short stories–I mean, really short stories. Here’s one by Steve Rubenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, which won best short feature in the recent American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors’ contest.

'These great truths need no bucking up from me'

This is an example of a writer (1) seeing a story where most people wouldn’t see one, and (2) being smart enough to get out of the way. Steve’s story is 512 words. Most people would have written it at something like 712 words, with more quotes or more outside observations. Steve is a former columnist, and you can see the virtues of that experience as he pares out every extraneous word in this slice of life about the death of a pet rat.

S.F. KIDS SPEND RECESS TOASTING THE BEST RAT WHO EVER LIVED
By Steve Rubenstein
November 12, 2002

They raised their grape juice cups at Lakeshore Elementary School in memory of Jupiter the rat.

“He was a great rat,” said fourth-grade teacher Rich Mertes. “Possibly the greatest rat in the world. And he never bit anyone.”

Jupiter was so great that more than 100 kids elected to skip recess Friday in order to attend Jupiter’s funeral, held inside Room 106 at the school on Middlefield Drive in San Francisco.

Jupiter died Thursday of old age in Mr. Mertes’ arms, moments after the dismissal bell rang. He was 2.

For the funeral, the door of his empty cage was left open. The purple tissue box inside that was his home was vacant. On top of the cage was a letter to Jupiter from the class of fourth-graders.

“If you can read this, Room 106 is very sad. If you could read this, I will miss you. I hope I will see you again. I hope God will help you.”

Nearby on a table, Jupiter’s body lay in state, on a paper plate, covered with purple flower petals and a single green leaf. A candle flickered alongside.

Students gathered around, shoulder to shoulder, gazing in silence. Some cried. There was no pushing.

The eulogies were many. Students recalled how the gray-and-white rat was fond of sitting quietly on their shoulders or having his stomach rubbed. He also liked to race his twin brother, Oreo, through a cardboard maze fashioned from an old refrigerator box. Jupiter usually lost those contests.

“He was a more mellow rat than Oreo,” Mr. Mertes said. “He took things easier.” Each morning, while the students sat on the carpet in a circle to discuss the events of the day, Jupiter would be passed among them. Occasionally, he was kissed.

“If a child had a tough day, or a bad dream or some other problem, holding Jupiter would help,” said Mr. Mertes. “He taught us about warmth and compassion.”

The overflow crowd of students, teachers, parents and school principal who attended the service said they did not mind giving up recess to do it.

“You can play ball anytime,” explained Gregory Reznik, 9. “But Jupiter was really special. I really liked him. I wanted to be here, to say goodbye.”

And then the students, accompanied by Mr. Mertes on the guitar, sang an Irish ballad of farewell, and the cups of grape juice were passed around.

“It’s appropriate when someone passes on to drink a toast,” said Mr. Mertes. “So please raise your cup of grape juice, in memory of the best rat who ever lived. He was my friend, and he was a fine companion. To Jupiter!”

“To Jupiter!” the kids replied in unison, and they drained their juice cups.

Jupiter is survived by his brother. His body will be buried in the Room 106 planter box on the playground, beneath some sage.

I asked Steve where he found the story, and how he envisoned it while he was reporting it:

“I was dropping off my third-grade daughter at school in San Francisco and was just about to drive away when I heard the principal announce to the students over the loudspeaker that Jupiter the rat had died and that his funeral would be held at recess. I figured I better stick around, because I had never attended the funeral of a rat.

“You ask what sort of story I envisioned. I try not to do too much envisioning. Usually, a reporter cannot envision anything as good as what happens.

“I could talk about how rats speak to the human condition, and how love transcends the human-rat prejudice, and how children understand the world better than grownups, but such talk would be a waste of time. These great truths need no bucking up from me. Covering the death of a rat is like covering anything else. The reporter writes down what he sees and hears, looks for details, keeps quiet and tries to remember that, at a rat funeral, a dead rat is much more compelling than a live reporter.”