friends

Lunch

~ Lee Swanson ~ 4 Comments

One day, probably soon, someone will ask about our trip to Maui. And someone will ask what I liked best about it. And you would think that would be a hard question.

We had a great rental condo, with a view of the ocean and easy access to the beach. We walked in the sand to a bakery for coffee and pastries for breakfast. The temperature was in the 70s and 80 every day, a little windy a couple of times, but balmy in every sense of the word.

On my birthday, we had a wonderful meal at a restaurant on the beach. We found other great places to eat and drinks with umbrellas and pineapples stuck in them.

The road to Hana was as advertised if for no other reason than to say that we had done that, been there, didn’t buy the t-shirt.

We shopped, we relaxed, we did what we pleased. Even retired people need to get away and chill. And as much as we enjoyed all of that, and enjoyed each other, none of it was the best thing about the trip.

The best thing was lunch on Friday. The food was fine. But that’s not the point. One day on Facebook I said we were in Maui, and a friend named Tom Petersen saw it and posted “we’ll be there on Thursday.” I emailed him and we knew we had to get together. Because Tom Petersen is not just a Facebook friend.

In 1976 Tom hired me, despite my rather thin qualifications, to anchor the weekend sports and report news three nights a week at KWWL TV in Waterloo, Iowa. I worked the second shift as a reporter, and, let’s face it, there’s not a lot going on in Waterloo, Iowa, after dark. Not in 1976 any way. So while I was hanging around the newsroom in the evening, I started fooling with the scripts. Tom was not only the news director, he was also the anchor, and he had stuff to do. And it was just the two of us, a photographer, the weather guy and sports anchor. So when I asked if I could rewrite some things and edit some tapes, he told me to go ahead and see what I could do.

It wasn’t long before I was producing the ten o’clock newscast for him. It was as much fun as I’ve ever had in news. He trusted me. He didn’t even proofread the scripts before he went on air. He said he liked reading through it on the air and figuring out where it was going. So from time to time, I’d try to trip him up. Never could.

Once he told me people had stopped him in the grocery store and quoted a story from the previous night’s newscast to him. You can have the awards; in a world where the words are gone as soon as they are spoken, having them remembered is a high compliment. I still remember the story.

I stopped reporting news and sports and was producing two newscasts a day. It was what I was supposed to be doing. I was a poor excuse for a reporter. But I could write for other people. I write reading better than I read writing. And I had a sense for how to put together a newscast.

Tom made that possible. Somewhere along the line we went from boss and employee to friends. After about three years, he did the unthinkable for a boss. He encouraged me to move on. He got me an interview at a station in Dayton Ohio, and I was offered the job. I was too insecure to take it. Tom let me learn. The next time he arranged an interview for me, I was ready.

He left KWWL for Detroit and when I left shortly thereafter, he flew back just to help me pack. Tom would later go to WGN radio in Chicago where he did morning drive and became news director. When you Google him, the word “legendary” pops up. And he’s in the WGN Walk of Fame. Google doesn’t know that he’s my friend. But I do.

Plain and simple, I wouldn’t have had a career in television news had it not been for Tom Petersen.

I wouldn’t have a nickname either. The first time I turned up in the newsroom, driving into Waterloo with a U-Haul trailer behind my car, he looked up from his desk and said “oh look, it’s Leo Swanberg.” Swanberg didn’t stick, thankfully, but Leo followed me to four more television stations and forty two more years, so far. I am still Leo to my closest friends in broadcasting. It’s what the grandchildren call me. 

Though we’ve stayed in touch, it’s been about 27 years since we’ve seen each other. It was, you might imagine, quite a lunch.

Phone Call

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

Something unusual happened to me today. My phone rang.

Now, I spend a lot of time with my phone in my hand. A lot. Facebook, news sites, texts, the occasional game, Twitter, the occasional game, but I virtually never talk on it.

I’m not entirely sure why it’s called a phone.

A name came up on the screen when it made that odd ringing sound that I rarely hear, and it was someone I haven’t talked to in several years. I mean, several years. Like, forever. This was one of those many people we all know who we pretend to connect with through Christmas letter.  Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how she knew my number.

My first thought, of course, was “oh my god…what’s happened?” It isn’t my birthday, it isn’t her birthday (I don’t think so anyway), so something awful must have happened.

But, no. Not really. I mean, some people we know in common have died, and I’m not saying that’s not awful, because, it is, but it didn’t happen today and we both knew of it. So, my point is, there wasn’t a real motivation to call. She just wanted to ask me how I was and what was going on with me.

We talked about each other’s families and reminisced about when we used to work together and people we both knew and what we knew of them now–living and dead.

And then, in fairly short order, ten or fifteen minutes, we said goodbye.

But it was the best part of my day.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to communicate with a friend, you either wrote a letter or called. Now, we email, text, or post on Facebook or Twitter or something equally stupid. True enough, you can’t send pictures during a phone call (at least I can’t). But you also can’t hear someone’s voice on Facebook and you can’t react to the emotion in what they say.

Social media might have a lot of values, but nothing beats talking to a friend. An actual living human being, without a keyboard between you.

We’re separated by miles, and years, and yet when we were talking to each other, we were right there, in the moment. As though I never left. Social media, as “social” as it may be, doesn’t do that. Too many Facebook posts start with the second paragraph, assuming we’re on the same wavelength, watching the same TV program, the same game, experiencing the same whatever; and the truth is, I’ve no damned idea what you’re talking about.

I’m sure there is a lot of research and more than a few doctoral theses on the value of social media or, conversely, the breakdown in communication and human interaction because of social media. But I haven’t read any of that. I’m just a guy whose phone rang today. Out of the blue. And I’m sitting here thinking, why don’t I use that phone as a phone.

I’ll still text and post on Facebook, but, if you know me, or we knew each other once upon a time, don’t be too terribly surprised if your phone rings one day. And it will be some odd number you don’t recognize and you’ll let it go to voicemail. Then you’ll discover it was me. And I hope you’ll call back.

And whoever you are, reading this, if there’s someone you haven’t talked to in a long time, maybe you should pick up your phone and push that phone button.  That’s what it’s there for. (It’s the one with the icon that looks like what a phone used to look like.) You might be surprised at what happens.

Facebook and Friends

~ Lee Swanson ~ 6 Comments

Facebook has done something to annoy me again. And no, I don’t mean the threats to change the privacy settings or the plan to charge users for every mouse click. I’m fine with all that.

The thing I find annoying is the list of people in the middle of the page who Facebook has decided I might want to add as friends. Facebook is not supposed be a place to find new friends; it’s supposed to be a place to connect with the friends you’ve already got so you don’t have to actually talk to them.

Friend, in the Facebook world, being an illusory term at best.

The friend Facebook wants to introduce me to are friends of friends or friends of friends friends, and in almost every instance, no one I’ve ever heard of. Sort of friends once removed. So I ignore the suggestion. It’s hard enough to keep track of cousins once removed, or even to understand what they have been removed from, without having to categorize other people.

(Grammatical side-rant: “Once removed” is redundant. A cousin, or
anything other than a cat, cannot be twice removed. She’s either removed or she’s not).

Every year or so, when I was feeling even more curmudgeonly than usual, I would look through the list of Facebook friends I have accumulated, and cull the herd. It’s not something I had to do. If people consistently post idiotic claptrap (like this post for instance), I boot them right away. So what is left are the people who aren’t overtly offensive. But I sorted through it anyway. Just, because.

First to go were the people from work who, for some god-forsaken reason, I felt compelled to friend. Most of what they post are things they are compelled to post, by work. They’re gone from my list because, with a retirement date in sight, I have less and less reason to be appropriate.

If you know me—that is to say if you’re on my friends list—you know that I’ve never had any patience for doing the appropriate thing. So just imagine what I’m like now.

(Grammatical side-rant two: Facebook has made friend a verb. Another loss for the language. You no longer have to “make a friend.” You just “friend.” “I friended her.” And to think I was sure we had hit bottom when “effort” and “task” were made into  verbs. “We’re efforting that right now.” “He’s been tasked with efforting that.”)

Next to go are the people who post pictures without explaining what they are pictures of or who is in the picture or why they are significant, interesting or out of focus. I don’t know who those people in the picture are, whose wedding they are attending, where they are vacationing or what that symbol is on your front yard. After all, who do you think you are, a friend?

You would think I would expunge the people who rarely post anything, because, they’re just added baggage. But I am one of those people and I can’t be too hard on us.

So who does that leave? Well, there are the people who actually post interesting things. They’re keepers. I also keep the people who mostly post pictures of their kids and grandkids because, even though I don’t know the kids, you can’t delete kids or dogs. It’s just wrong. Cats, on the other hand…

Curiously, I keep the people who only post memes they have clipped from somewhere else. You know the ones; they look like they were made by American Greetings. A pencil sketch and a piece of short wisdom in Helvetica. It’s always the kind of thing George Carlin used to say, even though it turns out George Carlin never said most of the things he used to say. The stuff that makes you wish you had thought of that. Once in a while I read one that I had thought of, but I’m not good enough at graphics to make it into a post.

I do find these cut and paste memes annoying. I’d rather read what people have to say for themselves. But I’m willing to put up with them because I have no interest in going to whatever those sites are to find that stuff for myself.

I keep some friends just to bulk up the list. One of the few things I post, other than sarcastic and annoying comments about other peoples’ posts, is a link to these infrequent blog posts. I’m still childish enough—or perhaps I am once again childish enough—to watch anxiously to see how many people read my blografitti. Through diligent study of search engine optimization and marketing this blog now has a loyal and deeply disturbed readership in the mid-10s. For that I have my Facebook friends to thank.

And that gets me down to the last list. My actual friends. It’s a very short list. And getting shorter. But I keep them. I’m funny that way.

August in December

~ Lee Swanson ~ 5 Comments

There was a retirement celebration last night at the television station where I used to hang out. Surrounded by friends, co-workers past and present, and a few dignitaries, J. W. August was lauded with deserved accolades, honors and, because it is television, the inevitable tribute video.

He accumulated an obscene number of awards and honors in his career, but his greatest accomplishment may have been working at the same television station for 32 years. I traveled through seven stations in that time span; leaving some because I wanted to and others because they insisted.

At one time or another he held a lot of jobs and job titles there, but his devotion and his heart is in investigative journalism. And more than once last night I heard him described as a journalistic pit bull who grabs on to a story and won’t let go.

It’s been said of him before and, while it’s true as far it goes, it strikes me as an odd compliment. After all, isn’t that in the definition of the job? Get a lead and follow it to the end, wherever it takes you. The thing is, he does it better than most.

But those who see him only as a pit bull don’t know the same guy I do. They have never been in the newsroom with him when a child walks in. Never seen him drop whatever he is doing, deadline be damned and plop down on the floor in front of the kid, pulling a box of toys and a bag of candy from his desk while magically producing quarters from thin air and giggling and smiling.

They’ve never gone to him with a problem, large or small, real or perceived and had him turn his full attention and energy to them, not to ask what he can do, but to tell you what he’s going to do.

A pit bull? The J. W. who is my friend is a puppy dog. Kind, caring, undyingly loyal and – if you stand next to him – likely to lick you on the cheek.

Jack

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

Friends and co-workers from a career full of memories got together today.  We were together because one of us wasn’t there.  He died two weeks ago.

And it’s made me think about how much of life is happenstance and coincidence.  If I hadn’t answered the phone I probably would never have had the chance to come to San Diego and work with these folks. If I’d stayed home one night instead of going out, I never would have met my wife.  Some people will say “it’s meant to be.”  I think I careen through life and things happen by coincidence and happenstance that control the place I live, the people I know, the friends I have, even my family and the people who matter to me.

If I hadn’t gotten the job in San Diego I never would have had the chance to get to know Jack Moorhead.  I knew him mostly at work – and a few parties here and there.  But along the way I learned about the care, feeding and rearing of tortoises – though I never saw his tortoises.  I learned about his chocolate Labradors and later his pug.  I got several recipes – most with sautéed garlic.  I learned about boat building, though I never saw his boats.  I heard about his bartending days.  I learned about the Pacific Crest Trail without ever setting foot on it.  And I got to know his family through his eyes.

I can’t imagine that Jack learned anything from me.

And there were a few things I learned from him that turned out to be just Jack keeping a straight face.  I believed some of them, but he usually would smile and shake his head and say “no of course not” and we’d laugh.  We laughed a lot as I recall.

Jack had a very quick, sharp sense of humor.  It probably says more about me than it does Jack that most of the stories I remember weren’t entirely fit for polite company.  I was up on the desk one morning looking at his story list when he reached into his lunch and started to slice a fresh pear just as the morning tape editor walked by.  She looked over and said “oh nice pear Jack” and just under his breath he said “yours too.”

One day he told the morning meeting that a crew was going to go to arraignment court because a dentist had been arrested, accused of molesting his female patients when they were under anesthetic.  Jack said he had cautioned Lorraine to be aware if the dentist ever said “now you’re going to feel a little prick.”

I saw Jack for the last time a few months ago.  Cheryl and I were going to a yogurt shop in the neighborhood and Jack and Lorraine happened to be at the restaurant next door for dinner and he looked out the window just as we walked past.  He got up from the table and followed us to the yogurt shop, bumped into me a couple times and told me to watch where he was going.  We talked for not long enough before he had to get back to his dinner.

A week ago we took our granddaughters to the yogurt shop.  I looked carefully through the windows of the restaurant, and thought about the coincidences that turn out to mean so much.

Friends

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

It could have been last weekend. I went to a movie and then sat in the parking lot and stared out the window. “I think I know all those people,” I thought.
But it wasn’t last weekend. It was 1983 and the movie was “The Big Chill.”

The Big ChillLast weekend was a Big Chill weekend, without Kevin Costner. Costner was the character who committed suicide and brought the friends together for his funeral, though he and the flashback scenes to their anti-war days at the University of Michigan were cut from the movie. (I did stop at the cemetery when I got to my little hometown and believe me when I say that unless you donate huge sums to your alma mater you don’t want to see your last name engraved in granite.)

So there we were, friends from high school and college together again, and I was right. I do know all those people.

Granted, it’s been forty years and maybe some of us have changed, just a little.

Kevin Kline’s character, the successful businessman, is retired. His success turned him conservative, so at least while he was there we didn’t discuss much politics.

The pot, pills and cocaine have been replaced by alcohol.

I often come away regretting more what I didn’t say than what I did. Though perhaps it’s safer that way.

The William Hurt character has the cabin that Costner started on “the property” and, as in the movie, we drove out to see it and spent a fine afternoon there. Looking out at the trees and grass I understood immediately why Hurt liked it there and I heard my inner Jeff Goldblum say “that’s what’s great about the outdoors. It’s one giant toilet.”

The JoBeth Williams married a man who wasn’t in our school but he fits in perfectly and could have been in the neighborhood if only geography hadn’t gotten in the way.

When it was time to get back to the city to catch my flight home, there was a part of me that wanted to say “we took a secret vote. We’re not leaving. We’re never leaving.”

But I did leave. Whether I went away is another question altogether.

It was quite a weekend. I am glad I went to The Big Chill in 1983. The other choice was “Poltergeist.”