Media landscape: a roundup

Gassing a societal change
Monday night, Cherub Charu had big news at 11 – the high gas prices could force massive, tectonic societal changes. Something to that effect, anyway. (I don’t think WLOSers know what the word “tectonic” means.)

But anyway, there she was, at a gas station somewhere in the dark, talking about how we’re all gonna change the way we live because regular is $2.52. She talked to a local pyschologist named Dirk Diggler or Rock Doddridge or something, and he gave Charu some pyschobabble she could use.

I think she talked to a driver or two, and it was people going about their business as usual. She reported no fundamental changes in behavior to back up the way she was pitching the story to start. Nothing. Nada. Bupkiss.

Charu, in an “oh by the way” moment, also duly noted that it would be poor folks who would be hit hardest. But she didn’t talk to a single working man in Candler; she didn’t talk to a single mom trying to make it; she didn’t interview penniless bloggers who just got their licenses. Nope.

Cut back to Charu, and we see a couple of minivans pull in behind her as she wraps things up. Cut to the Hummer commercial.

Cut.

The day all America celebrated
The Hooterville newspaper had a well-done story over the weekend about the 60th anniversary of the day Japan surrendered to officially end World War II. Most major media blew this one off.

Some nice remembrances collected by staffer Jennie “JJ Dyn-o-mite” Giles:

Scottie Matthews Stinemire of East Flat Rock remembers the moment the announcement was made here.

“I was just 16 years old when the war was going on and I went to work in the weave room at Balfour Textile Mill (Kimberly Clark Co. at Berkeley Mills) because all my brothers were in service. Our boss told us to watch for him to come out of the office when he heard the Japs had surrendered. When that happened, he came out waving his hands and motioned for us to start slamming off all the looms. Everyone was shutting down all the machinery. We were all so happy.

“The ladies had on white aprons and men in their over-alls. We didn’t bother to take off our aprons, but lined up, walking up a trail between snowball bushes, over the railroad track and up the hill to Balfour Baptist Church. We had a time of prayer, kneeling on our knees and praising God that soon our loved ones would be returning and asking God to bless and comfort those families whose loved ones had given their lives.”

And she quoted from her own newspaper:

From the Aug. 15, 1945, Times-News:

“Hendersonville and Henderson County celebrated the end of the war last night in a wild celebration that continued until the wee hours of the morning, but the celebrants, generally, were well-behaved if exuberant, and police officials of the county reported no difficulty from the mass of joyous citizens.

“From the time when the City Hall siren sounded the joyous news, Main Street quickly filled and thousands of shouting people and hundreds of blowing horns let off the steam accumulated by years of warfare plus days of anxious waiting for the ‘final returns.’

“While services in most of the churches are scheduled for 8 p.m. tonight, informal services were held in many churches last night as hundreds of people reverently marked the closing of the war.

It must have been quite a time.

Here’s the full story.

Miles of history
The Mountain Xpress scored with Steve Razz-a-ma-Tazz’s look at the history of the Miles building that just sold downtown. We’d expect nothing less, for this is the building the MountainX has inhabited for a decade.

But the report brings the building to vivid life, tying it to the human characters who nursed it along its colorful life. It’s a great little history lesson wrapped up in a trend story ensconced in a personality profile.

The top of the story sets us up:

There’s a bullet in the ceiling of Mountain Xpress Publisher Jeff Fobes’ office, but it wasn’t deposited there by the disgruntled subject of some long-forgotten exposé. And though the paper has been headquartered here since its founding, the heroic tale behind that slug is older still. For more than a century, in fact, the ornate brick-and-porcelain Miles Building – which anchors a key downtown intersection, fronting on Haywood Street, College Street, Battery Park Avenue and Wall Street – has seen more colorful Asheville characters playing out their dramas on its checkered-tile floors than Julia Wolfe’s boarding house.

OK, I’m in. Now this:

But those walls weren’t easy to keep clean back when everyone in Asheville burned coal to stay warm. Holbert had to hire a man to wash the black grime off the walls once a year, Elwood recalls.

“My dad told me that the city, in those days, kept an inspector in the top of the Jackson Building [then the city’s tallest structure] in the mornings with a pair of binoculars,” he continues, “and he would keep an eye on chimneys smoking. He had a stopwatch, and any chimney that smoked heavily when the furnace was first starting up in the morning for more than five minutes, the city would send them a citation and tell them to ‘get your furnace adjusted.'”

That inspector would most likely have worked for Asheville’s Smoke Abatement Agency as a member of the “Dawn Patrol.” According to a 1952 newspaper report, this crew conducted early morning inspections of boiler rooms to ensure that they were being fired up properly. The SAA, established in the 1940s to control coal-smoke pollution, was the direct ancestor of today’s smog-regulating Western North Carolina Regional Air Quality Agency.

Nice. And here’s another excerpt that piles layer upon layer of interesting connections.

Otis Ware had a photography studio on the opposite side of the Miles’ office from Room 212-213. One evening, he and his secretary were working late, and so was a female employee of the union. All at once, “I happened to hear [the union woman] screaming,” Ware recounts. “[I] rushed out to see what happened, and some guy had forced himself in on her and tried to take advantage of her.”

Ware ran back to his office and grabbed a pistol from his desk drawer. Meanwhile, the attacker fled down the hall and started climbing out the window onto a ledge.

Ware’s secretary, he remembers, “ran outside, and hollered back to tell me, ‘Yeah, he’s coming out of one of the windows!’ Well, I ran outside and shot him back inside,” firing from in front of what’s now the Haywood Park Hotel. “I wasn’t trying to hit the guy but kept him pinned down, and then I told her to go call the police. I finally got him cornered [under a table in the hallway] and pinned him down till they got there.”

Ware received a commendation from the mayor for his heroism. But he also caught some ribbing from the cops for what he’d done to his landlord’s property.

Ware, a longtime leader of Asheville’s black community, is now the Rev. Ware: He founded the Solid Rock Missionary Baptist Church six years ago in another historic building on Wyoming Road. And back in the ’70s, Ware led Bite, Chew and Spit – the house band for the Orange Peel, then the largest venue for black music in Asheville and a thriving center for African-American culture (see “Slice of Life,” Oct. 23, 2002 Xpress).

At that time, Ware was also closely involved with another pioneering local institution promoting racial equality – WBMU-FM, one of the first black-operated radio stations in the country – which broadcast from the Miles Building, in an office just below Ware’s photography studio.

Here’s the full story.

Exhumation in McDowell
In my favorite media market, Mack-Dowell County, the local newspaper reports on a real “cold case” thriller. A body has been exhumed in a 12-year-old murder case.

Detectives and deputies with the McDowell County Sheriff’s Office, agents with the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation and officials with Westmoreland Funeral Home, who were in charge of the funeral arrangements more than a decade ago, dug up the remains of Zilpha Louise Lowery. They unearthed her on Wednesday, July 27. Coincidentally, authorities say, it was the 12th anniversary her disappearance.
Capt. Dudley Greene of the McDowell County Sheriff’s Office, the lead investigator in the homicide, said detectives need DNA samples from Lowery to compare with other evidence.

The detectives note how far forensic detective work has come in just 10 years with the advances of DNA evidence. It’s amazing stuff. Here’s the McDowell News newspaper story.

And then there was this headline from the McDowell newspaper: A Personal Look at Bowel Problems.

Uhhhhh… No thanks.